Base-Rate Neglect in the News

It has been a while since I have thought about the fallacy of base-rate neglect. I did not even think about it when I was recently talking to someone about the reliability (or lack thereof) of tests for SARS-CoV2 antibodies. The piece by Todd Haugh and Suneal Bedi published in the New York Times today (linked above) is a useful reminder.

But it seems to me that Haugh and Bedi do not state their example clearly enough (perhaps because of editorial pruning). I would state it this way: Suppose that a test for SARS-CoV2 antibodies has a sensitivity of 90%. This means that it gives a positive result to 90% of subjects taking it who actually have the antibodies. Suppose also that it has a specificity of 90%. This means that it gives a negative result to 90% of subjects taking it who don't have antibodies. Suppose also that the incidence of antibodies to the virus in the population is (as the writers estimate it to be) 5 percent. And suppose, finally, that 2,000 randomly selected people take the test. If our sample is perfectly representative, 100 of the people taking the test will have the antibodies; and of these, 90 will get a positive result. Of the other 1,900 people taking the test, the ones who don’t have the antibodies, 1710 will get a negative result. But this means—and this is the most significant part—the remaining 190 will get a (false) positive result.

This is significant because it means that, of the 280 people in total who get a positive test result, more than two thirds will not have antibodies. In more general terms, the lower the base rate of what you are testing for, the higher the ratio of false positives to true positives, and therefore the less reliable a positive test result is. If the base rate is 10% then out of our representative sample of 2,000 tests there will be 180 true positives and 180 false positives. So, assuming 90% specificity and sensitivity of a test (which, as I gather, is far better than what any test now available can offer), the base rate has to be above 10% for a positive test result to be more reliable than a coin toss. (A coin toss as to whether a given positive result is true or false, that is, not a coin toss as to whether a given person has antibodies.)

These figures, of course, only describe a mathematical model. One assumption of the model is that persons taking the test are representative of the whole population with regard to the incidence of antibodies among them. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, it is not even probable; rather, people who have had symptoms that they attribute to COVID-19 are more likely to take the test than people who have not. Consequently, the incidence of antibodies to the virus will be higher among persons taking the test than the base rate of the total population. How much higher? I don’t know, and I don’t know how one would go about estimating such a thing.

Quantum Subterfuge

An account of the double-slit experiment by a former professor of mathematical physics is supposed to show the necessity of a paradoxical conclusion, but under examination it shows only the logical confusions of its author.

A few years ago, wanting to gain some knowledge of quantum mechanics, I started reading Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction by John Polkinghorne, formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge (Oxford University Press, 2002). I recall being exasperated by the book on my first attempt to read it, but I did not recall the reason until more recently, when I reread Polkinghorne’s commentary on the double-slit experiment.

Polkinghorne opens his exposition by quoting a comment of Richard Feynman on the experiment:

In reality it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by ‘explaining’ how it works. We will just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics. [Polkinghorne, p. 22; no citation of source provided]

I recall thinking, when I first read this: “Excellent! Now all I have to do is pay very close attention to the account of the experiment, and I shall understand the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.” This expectation was disappointed.

Describing the physical setup and the results of the experiment is not difficult. Electrons or other quantum particles are fired at a barrier in which there is a pair of adjacent slits. On the far side of the slits is a screen that detects the impacts of the particles. Classical physics predicts that the particles will impinge on the screen in a scattering pattern, with two areas of greatest intensity located directly across from the two slits. But in fact what emerges is an interference pattern, with a single area of greatest intensity located across from the midpoint of the two slits, exactly as if one were sending waves of some sort through the slits.

One might try to explain this on classical-physical lines by supposing that the electrons, though individually particulate in nature, behave in a wave-like fashion when they are shot together in a stream: it is the stream of electrons, not the individual electron, that behaves like a wave. It is true that one cannot observe wave behavior in an individual electron but only in a collection of electrons. But that does not mean that the wave behavior can be explained on classical lines as an effect of physical interaction among electrons in a stream, for the fact is that the electrons form an interference pattern even when they are fired at the slits one at a time. So either one must suppose that the behavior of each electron is influenced by the path taken by its predecessors, or one must attribute wave properties to each electron.

Things get even weirder when the experiment is set up so as to allow the option of detecting which slit the particles pass through. In so-called “quantum eraser” experiments (q.v., Wikipedia), photons passing through circular polarizers form a scattering pattern or an interference pattern according to whether the polarization that distinguishes which slit they went through is preserved or “erased” by a second, diagonal polarizer. And with so-called the “delayed choice” quantum eraser experiment (q.v., Wikipedia again), things get even weirder. But those are other stories, not covered in Polkinghorne’s book. Polkinghorne finds weirdness enough in the original plain double-slit experiment. He writes:

Electrons arriving one by one is particlelike behaviour; the resulting collective interference pattern is wavelike behaviour. But there is something much more interesting than that to be said. We can probe a little deeper into what is going on by asking the question, When an indivisible single electron is traversing the apparatus, through which slit does it pass in order to get to the detector screen? Let us suppose that it went through the top slit, A. If that were the case, the lower slit, B, was really irrelevant and it might just as well have been temporarily closed up. But, with only A open, the electron would not be most likely to arrive at the midpoint of the far screen, but instead it would be most likely to end up at the point opposite A. Since this is not the case [emphasis mine], we conclude that the electron could not have gone through A. Standing the argument on its head, we conclude that the electron could not have gone through B either. What then was happening? That great and good man, Sherlock Holmes, was fond of saying that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must have been the case, however improbable it may seem to be. Applying this Holmesian principle leads us to the conclusion that the indivisible electron went through both slits (pp. 23–24, latter emphasis in original).

Pay attention to the words “this is not the case” and try to identify their antecedent: what is not the case? The only thing mentioned in the preceding sentences that can in any clear sense be said to be the case or not the case is that the electron in question struck the screen at the point opposite slit A. But it would be insane to say casually that this is not the case, since there is nothing in the preceding stipulations that would justify such a conclusion. No, what Polkinghorne seems to mean by “this is not the case” is that it is not the case that the electron would be “most likely” to arrive at the point opposite slit A.

(Note: The remainder of this post has been extensively revised since I first posted it. The paragraphs that immediately follow analyze and criticize Polkinghorne’s argument in a very detailed fashion. Readers whose patience or interest is tried by such a treatment may profit by skipping down to the paragraph just before the first graph, in which I restate my criticisms by means of an analogy with an argument whose defects are much easier to recognize.)

Let “E” designate a randomly selected electron that is fired at the slits and that strikes the screen on the far side of them. The first part of Polkinghorne’s reasoning can then be summed up as follows:

1. If E passes through slit A, then E is most likely to strike the screen at a point opposite A.
2. E is not most likely to strike the screen at a point opposite A.
Therefore,
3. E does not pass through A.
   

The argument appears to be impeccable as far as its logical form is concerned. If that is so then the only question to be raised about its cogency is whether both premises are true. But in fact, reflection on the premises reveals an ambiguity that defeats the argument.

Consider premise 2 first. Given the setup of the experiment, the only evidence that we have for attributing to a randomly selected electron a probability of hitting one or another part of the screen is the interference pattern that emerges on the screen.  That pattern shows the highest incidence of impacts at the midpoint between the two slits. From this fact we can conclude that a randomly selected electron that strikes the screen is most likely to do so at the midpoint and not opposite either slit. This reasoning justifies Polkinghorne’s second premise.

Now consider the first premise. E was defined as an electron randomly selected from among all the electrons that reach the screen. But premise 1 concerns an electron that is randomly selected from among those that have passed through slit A. The pattern on the screen provides no evidence whatever relevant to a conclusion about the most likely point of arrival of such an electron as that. The only way to get evidence relevant to a conclusion about a randomly selected electron that has passed through slit A is either to block off slit B or to use a device that distinguishes the impacts of electrons that have passed through A from the impacts of electrons that have passed through B, as in the quantum eraser experiments. It is established that if we do either of these things then no interference pattern emerges. If we block off slit B, the highest incidence of impacts is opposite slit A, and if a device is used that distinguishes the electrons passing through A from those passing through B, then there will be an area of highest incidence opposite each slit. Under such conditions, Polkinghorne’s first premise is true. But his second premise is either false or irrelevant to the conclusion—false if it concerns an electron that has passed through slit A; irrelevant if it concerns an electron whose place of passage is undetermined.

Of course, this is not Polkinghorne’s entire argument, but only one half of its preliminary part. The second half of the preliminary part is the repetition of this argument with “slit B” taking the place of “slit A” in the premises and the conclusion.

4. If E passes through slit B, then E is most likely to strike the screen at a point opposite B.
5. E is not most likely to strike the screen at a point opposite B.
Therefore,
6. The electron did not go through B.
   

That part of the argument is, obviously, just as futile with “B” in it as it was with “A,” but let it stand for the moment, so that we can consider the would-be clinching part of the argument: the supposedly Holmesian conclusion that the electron passed through both slits. Polkinghorne’s stated reasoning is:

3. E does not pass through slit A.
6. E does not pass through slit B.
Therefore,
7. E passes through both slits.

There is nothing Holmesian about such a conclusion at all: Sherlock Holmes would not mistake such a bald non sequitur for a deduction. Nor does it take the intellect of Sherlock Holmes to see that what follows from lines 3 and 6 is:

E does not pass through either slit.

Of course, this is not the desired conclusion at all. Not only does Polkinghorne fail to establish his desired intermediate conclusions (3 and 6); he has set up his entire argument to establish the wrong final conclusion. The undesired conclusion can be avoided if we go back to re-write the previous two subordinate arguments by inserting the qualifier “solely” before the phrases “through slit A” and “through slit B,” and adding a further premise, “E passes through at least one slit.” But the fact remains that the intermediate conclusions 3 and 6 are not established or even made in the slightest degree credible by any of Polkinghorne’s reasoning.

The defects in Polkinghorne’s argument can be brought out by means of an analogy. A graph of the distribution of heights among adults in the United States looks like this (this graph and the two that follow are taken from this Web page by John D. Cook Consulting):

Graph 1: height distribution of all adults in US

The numbers along the bottom represent height in inches. The midpoint of the peak is around 67 inches. Let R be a randomly selected adult resident of the United States. According to this graph, R is most likely to be 67 inches tall. So R is not most likely to be, say, 64 inches tall, or 70 inches tall.

But R may, and indeed (setting aside rare cases of indeterminate sex) must, be either female or male. Suppose that R is female. The distribution of heights for adult females has a peak around 64 inches:

Graph 2: height distribution of adult females in the US

So if R is female, R is most likely to be about 64 inches tall. By contrast, the distribution for adult males has a peak around 70 inches.

Graph 3: height distribution of adult males in the US

So if R is male, R is most likely to be about 70 inches tall. Now imagine that, with these facts in hand, statistician John Jokinghorne presents us with the following argument:

1. If R is female, then R is most likely to be about 64 inches tall (by graph 2).
2. R is not most likely to be about 64 inches tall (by graph 1).
Therefore,
3. R is not female (from 1 and 2).
4. If R is male, then R is most likely to be about 70 inches tall (by graph 3).
5. R is not most likely to be about 70 inches tall (by graph 1).
Therefore,
6. R is not male (from 4 and 5).
Therefore,
7. R is both female and male (supposedly Holmesian conclusion from 3 and 6).

Clearly, all three of the conclusions in this argument are non sequiturs. Conclusion 3 does not follow from (1) and (2), because adding the supposition that R is female, as in (1), makes (2) false or irrelevant to (3). The same applies to the relation of premises 4 and 5 to conclusion 6. And the would-be Holmesian conclusion is of stupefying inconsequence. One may think that Polkinghorne’s argument cannot be as bad as Jokinghorne’s, because it is not so obviously bogus; but logically considered, it is every bit as bad. Its logical defects are exactly analogous. They just happen to be less conspicuous because of the more recondite subject matter.

One last observation: Presumably, Polkinghorne intends his argument to establish something not just about some randomly selected electron in the experiment but about every electron in the experiment, namely that it passes through both slits. The analogous conclusion of Jokinghorne’s argument would be:

8. Every American adult is both female and male.

If Jokinghorne’s argument does not incline you to accept this conclusion (and it shouldn’t), then neither should Polkinghorne’s argument incline you to accept his conclusion about the double-slit experiment.

There may be compelling reasons in quantum mechanics to say that each electron goes through both slits, but whatever those reasons may be, Polkinghorne fails to state them. Making a popular exposition of quantum mechanics requires making the reasoning that leads to its paradoxical conclusions clear. Instead of this, Polkinghorne’s book offers the kind of confused thinking that can at best produce only incomprehension and that at worst produces the false belief that one has understood something when in fact one has merely participated in the author’s own confusions.

Philosopher Defends B***s***

Stephen Asma argues that, because philosophers have failed to formulate a criterion to distinguish science from pseudo-science, the claims of traditional Chinese medicine cannot be dismissed. But it turns out that all that he thinks important is whether the treatments are effective—a question that he thinks immune to critical examination because it is not the sort of thing about which professional philosophers can engage in a lot of sophisticated-sounding talk.

The greater one-horned rhinoceros: one of the species being 

hunted to extinction to supply the market for traditional 

Chinese medicine (source: National Geographic)

Is The Stone, the philosophy blog of the New York Times, meant to be a platform on which professional philosophers can commit the intellectual equivalent of soiling themselves in public, or is my perception just biased by my attention to a few bad examples? I don’t know, but a piece by Stephen Asma published yesterday, “The Enigma of Chinese Medicine” (The Stone, September 29, 2013), certainly falls within the category of public trouser-fouling. Actually, it is an example of something even more contemptible than that: the employment of philosophical sophistication in the service of intellectual confusion.

The argument of Asma’s piece, to the extent that it has one, is that, because philosophers have failed to solve the problem of demarcating science from pseudo-science, one cannot reject the claims of certain “alternative” medical practices, specifically traditional Chinese medicine (“TCM”) and feng shui. After opening with an anecdote about how he recovered from a cold shortly after ingesting a Chinese preparation of freshly spilled turtle blood and strong liquor, Asma intimates that one cannot rule out the possibility that the Chinese concoction has curative powers because of the persistence of what philosophers of science call “the demarcation problem”:

The contemporary philosopher of science Larry Laudan claims that philosophers have failed to give credible criteria for demarcating science from pseudoscience. Even falsifiability, the benchmark for positivist science, rules out many of the legitimate theoretical claims of cutting-edge physics, and rules in many wacky claims, like astrology — if the proponents are clever about which observations corroborate their predictions. Moreover, historians of science since Thomas Kuhn have pointed out that legitimate science rarely abandons a theory the moment falsifying observations come in, preferring instead (sometimes for decades) to chalk up counter evidence to experimental error. The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend even gave up altogether on a so-called scientific method, arguing that science is not a special technique for producing truth but a flawed species of regular human reasoning (loaded with error, bias and rhetorical persuasion). And finally, increased rationality doesn’t always decrease credulity.

We like to think that a rigorous application of logic will eliminate kooky ideas. But it doesn’t. Even a person as well versed in induction and deduction as Arthur Conan Doyle believed that the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamen expedition, may have been caused by a pharaoh’s curse.

Setting aside the appeals to authority, Asma’s main claims here are these: (1) No one has identified a reliable criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. (2) No one has given a credible specification of a method distinctive of science. (3) Increased rationality or practice in induction and deduction does not always decrease credulity toward kooky ideas.

The third claim seems pretty clearly irrelevant to Asma’s thesis. The case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in the curse of Tutankhamen (it is disappointing that Asma does not cite the more instructive case of Doyle’s belief in the Cottingley fairies) might be of some relevance if it were an instance in which someone was led to supernaturalistic conclusions by sound deductive and inductive reasoning (supposing such a thing to be possible). But it is not; it is an instance of the distortion of judgment by cognitive bias. Such cases remind us that cognitive bias afflicts all human beings without exception. That is precisely why we need instruction in deductive and inductive reasoning, as well as knowledge of the cognitive biases themselves: only then can we, sometimes, rise above our worse selves and correct our judgment in empirical matters when it goes awry. But, as Asma makes no further reference to these observations in his piece, I will say no more about them.

What of the first two claims? Granted, for the sake of argument, that there is no known universal criterion or distinctive method demarcating science from pseudo-science, how is that supposed to lend credibility to the claims of traditional Chinese medicine? Asma never makes this clear, but the implied reasoning seems to be this: “Many people dismiss traditional Chinese medicine as pseudo-science; but there is no way to distinguish in principle between science and pseudo-science; therefore, one cannot dismiss traditional Chinese medicine.” If this is the intended argument, it fails on two scores. In the first place, the fact that one cannot give a universal criterion for distinguishing A from B does not show that there is no difference between A and B, or that one is unjustified in identifying something as an instance of A and not of B. There is, for example, no commonly accepted explanation of the distinction between right and wrong: it doesn’t follow that one can’t soundly and justly judge of some action that it is wrong. Second, even if Asma could show that traditional Chinese medicine escapes the charge of pseudo-science, it would not follow that its claims have the slightest degree of credibility. “Scientific” doesn’t imply “warranted” or “sound,” and “not pseudo-science” doesn’t imply “not a load of bollocks.”

I have said that this seems to be Asma’s argument, but in the end it is not clear that Asma even intends to make an argument. What we get instead in the conclusion of the piece is just a certain insinuation. After providing a second anecdote of his undergoing a treatment by traditional Chinese medicine and subsequently feeling decidedly better, he concludes the piece with these paragraphs:

It seems entirely reasonable to believe in the effectiveness of T.C.M. [traditional Chinese medicine] and still have grave doubts about qi. In other words, it is possible for people to practice a kind of “accidental medicine”—in the sense that symptoms might be alleviated even when their causes are misdiagnosed (it happens all the time in Western medicine, too). Acupuncture, turtle blood, and many similar therapies are not superstitious, but may be morsels of practical folk wisdom. The causal theory that’s concocted to explain the practical successes of treatment is not terribly important or interesting to the poor schlub who’s thrown out his back or taken ill.

Ultimately, one can be skeptical of both qi and a sacrosanct scientific method, but still be a devotee of fallible pragmatic truth. In the end, most of us are gamblers about health treatments. We play as many options as we can; a little acupuncture, a little ibuprofen, a little turtle’s blood. Throw enough cards (or remedies), and eventually some odds will go your way. Is that superstition or wisdom?

If this is the summation of Asma’s position, then the preceding references to the demarcation problem, far from being an argument, are just a sort of preparatory entertainment and are inessential, if not altogether irrelevant, to his main point. According to what Asma says here, it makes no difference whether traditional Chinese medicine is science or pseudo-science, because the legitimacy of its theoretical claims—about qi and so forth—is irrelevant to claims of its effectiveness. The “fallible pragmatic truth” of such claims is what really matters.

Notice what has happened here. Having spent most of the piece considering the theoretical claims of traditional Chinese medicine and invoking the demarcation problem to argue—by a villainous non sequitur—that because we can’t solve the problem, we can’t dismiss such claims, he now says that it is only the claims of effectiveness that matter. And with regard to such claims, he coyly suggests, we are wise to take a chance on the treatments because we can’t know that the claims for them are false.

What sort of claim is Asma talking about here? And how are such claims to be assessed? Notice that there is a world of difference between claims of the following two sorts:

(1) I underwent treatment T, and subsequently my headache went away.

(2) Treatment T is effective against headache.

Obviously, the second claim is much stronger than the first. For one thing, it has a generality to it that the first lacks. But more than that, it asserts a causal connection that the first one does not. To establish claim (1), all that is needed is evidence that the speaker had a headache before she underwent T and ceased to have it afterward. To establish claim (2), we require evidence (a) that quite generally people with headaches who undergo T lose those headaches after undergoing T and (b) that this is not due to factors extraneous to T, such as the headaches going away by themselves. Anecdotes on the lines of claim (1) can support point (a), and many people content themselves with finding evidence of this nature—a manifestation of confirmation bias. But such anecdotes, no many how many in number, fail to establish, or even to support, claim (2) if they are not supplemented by evidence supporting point (b). That sort of evidence is by far the more difficult sort to procure. It requires experimental controls, such as blinding and, optimally, even double-blinding (arranging that neither the administrator nor the recipient of the treatment knows whether T is being administered or not). And, of course, in any study of such matters, the significance of the results must be assessed according to the size of the sample, the basis of selection, possible sources of bias, and so forth. Such considerations are the ABCs of the “scientific method” on whose existence sophisticated philosophers of science like Feyerabend (invoked by Asma in the passage quoted earlier) would cast such scornful doubt.

What is exasperating about Asma’s piece is that he proceeds as if none of this elementary scientific method existed, or mattered. He seems to reason that, once the theoretical claims of traditional Chinese medicine are set aside, no critical assessment of the remaining claims is possible: anecdotes are all the evidence that anyone has or needs, because the choice of a treatment is always a gamble anyway. Well, of course there is an element of uncertainty in any medical treatment; in that respect, any choice of treatment is a gamble. But the fact that we don’t know exactly what is going to happen in any specific instance does not entail that we don’t know a great deal about the effectiveness of treatments. And of course it is possible that one or another Chinese treatment will eventually be found to be genuinely effective (i.e., more effective than placebo); that does not entail that we don’t already know a lot of them to be ineffective, or that we have as much reason to believe as to disbelieve the claims of effectiveness made for others of them. (See, e.g., Joe Nickell, “Traditional Chinese Medicine: Views East and West,” Skeptical Inquirer, March–April 2012.)

Pondering the “demarcation problem” is a professional specialty of philosophers. Evaluating the effectiveness of “alternative” medical treatments is not: it is a matter for medical scientists, though the results of their research can be judged and appreciated by persons without medical or other scientific training. Asma, having gotten to the end of his professional expertise by reflecting—uselessly and irrelevantly, as it emerges in the end—on the demarcation problem, proceeds as if there is simply no further basis for a critical assessment of the claims of traditional Chinese medicine. But there manifestly is: it just isn’t a matter of philosophical expertise. The specifically philosophical elements of Asma’s piece turn out in the end to be nothing but a blind for making it look as though claims of effectiveness made for traditional Chinese medicine and feng shui were beyond reach of critical examination.

And When I Know Precisely What Is Meant by “Magisterium”

Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria” has weaknesses enough when considered solely on the basis of his presentation of it. When one considers it in light of the original ecclesiastical meaning and use of the term “magisterium,” it appears positively grotesque.

Pope Paul VI

A while back, I posted three entries on Stephen Jay Gould’s view of the relation between science and religion, a conception that he sums up as the principle of “non-overlapping magisteria” or “NOMA” (“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion,” “More on Gould on Science and Religion,” and “A Dilemma for NOMA”). By “magisterium”—a bit of ecclesiastical Latin derived from magister, “teacher”—Gould says that he means “a domain of authority in teaching,” or, more specifically, “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (see note at end for source). He explains further:

Each domain of inquiry frames its own rules and admissible questions, and sets its own criteria for judgment and resolution. These accepted standards, and the procedures developed for debating and resolving legitimate issues, define the magisterium—or teaching authority—of any given realm.

According to Gould, science and religion are two “non-overlapping magisteria.” The magisterium of science comprises “the empirical realm: what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” while that of religion “extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.” No question belongs within both magisteria: hence their “non-overlapping” character.

The idea that religion has or is a magisterium in Gould’s sense, and the idea that questions of ethical value and existential meaning belong within that magisterium, both invite strong objections, some of which I presented in my previous entries on this topic. Right now, though, I want to consider simply what the term “magisterium” means. I have presented Gould’s account of what he means by it. But it remains to consider what it means in the discourse from which he takes it, that of the Catholic Church. In what follows, I shall do my best to interpret accurately the passages that I have found, though I very much doubt that I shall avoid errors, not only because of my lack of familiarity with Catholic doctrine but because of my lack of comfort with it. Still, I believe that the evidence of the quotations will suffice to show how ill-suited the term “magisterium” is to the use to which Gould wants to put it.

The earliest occurrence of the word “magisterium” in Catholic ecclesiastical discourse that I have been able to find comes from a document of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870):

Wherefore, by divine and Catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God as found in Scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the Church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium. (First Vatican Council, session 3, chapter 3, article 8)

The terms “solemn,” “ordinary,” and “universal” here are all technical terms. Definitive decrees made by the Pope and his councils belong to the “solemn” or “extraordinary” magisterium of the church, while all other teachings of the Pope and the bishops belong to the “ordinary” and “universal” magisterium of the church (source). The main point here is that the Bible and the traditions of the Catholic Church contain a body of teaching that is divinely revealed and therefore authoritative.

A passage from an encyclical by Pius IX, the Pope who presided over the First Vatican Council, lays stress on the point that it is solely the Pope and the bishops who bear the divinely conferred authority to determine revealed truth, not the laity (and, presumably, not the lower priesthood either):

For these writings attack and pervert the true power of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff and the bishops, who are the successors of blessed Peter and the apostles; they transfer it instead to the people, or, as they say, to the community. They obstinately reject and oppose the infallible magisterium both of the Roman Pontiff and of the whole Church in teaching matters. (On the Church of Italy, Germany, and Switzerland (1871), “Further Heresies”; source)

The same point was affirmed by the Second Vatican Council (1965), over which Pope Paul VI presided:

But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church [soli vivo Ecclesiae Magisterio concreditum est], whose authority [auctoritas] is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office [Magisterium] is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.

It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church [Ecclesiae Magisterium], in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls. (Dei Verbum, chapter two, article 10; English text; Latin text)

The gist of this passage is that the magisterium of the Church is an authority divinely vested in the Pope and the bishops to teach the members of the Church what is divinely revealed in scripture and tradition. (The alternation in the last-quoted passage between the two translations “teaching office” and “teaching authority” does not reflect a difference of meaning but rather a wish to avoid repetition in the sentence in which the word “authority” (auctoritas) also occurs.)

The ecclesiastical use of the term “magisterium” differs from Gould’s appropriation of it on several points. First, in ecclesiastical usage, a magisterium is not a “domain” of teaching authority: it simply is teaching authority. There are, of course, discussions of the range of matters in which the Church has this authority; but the word “magisterium” signifies the authority itself and not the subject matter to which it pertains. Hence, in ecclesiastical usage, it would be plain nonsense to speak, as Gould sometimes does, of the magisterium of this or that subject matter (e.g., natural fact, ethical values, etc.). The magisterium is the magisterium of the Church. Second, the pertinent sense of “authority” is not merely epistemological but also institutional: the magisterium of the Church is the authority that a certain body, the Catholic episcopacy, has over the faithful in matters of faith and morals. Third, the term “teaching” here is not a byword for “inquiry” or “discovery” but signifies the handing-down of conclusions by those in authority to those who are obliged to accept them. The magisterium of the Church has nothing to do with procedures for posing questions and resolving disputes. The Church may have these, but they are not what the word “magisterium” signifies. Rather, it signifies the status of the upper priesthood’s conclusions as divinely revealed truth. Fourth, the term occurs (so far as I have found) only in the singular form, never in the plural: there is no ecclesiastical talk of “magisteria,” but only of the magisterium of the Church (Magisterium Ecclesiae). Thus the term does not serve to demarcate one subject matter from another or one way of answering questions from another, but only to identify who or what bears teaching authority in matters of revealed truth.

In my previous entries on Gould’s thesis, I argued that there is no compelling reason to believe that religion has teaching authority with respect to any subject matter whatever. Specific religious institutions may have sectarian authority over their adherents, but there is no “form of teaching [that] holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” characteristic of religion as such.

As questionable as it is to speak of the “magisterium of religion,” to speak of the “magisterium of science” is even worse. In fact, it is positively grotesque. There are, of course, creationists who try to smear evolutionary biology with the tu-quoque claim that it is a religion (example 1; example 2). But even they do not hold that science has the authority structure of a religion: rather, their claim is that the theory of evolution is not science. Anyway, regardless of what such ideologues may say, there can be no question that in its original import, the term “magisterium” has no application to scientific inquiry.

Certainly science can be taught and is taught. Many of its practitioners are among its teachers. But the practice of science is not in any serious sense a “form of teaching,” in Gould’s phrase; much less is it a handing-down of dogmata from those in authority to those who must obey. There is, in fact, almost nothing in the notion of Ecclesiae Magisterium that applies to science. The mismatch between the original meaning of the term and the use to which Gould tries to put it is so stark that one has to wonder how Gould could profess to “find the term so beautifully appropriate for the central concept of this book that I venture to impose this novelty upon the vocabulary of many readers.” Whatever made the term seem that way to him, I suspect that it had very little to do with what the Vatican actually meant by it.

REFERENCES

Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999). The indented quotation is from pp. 52–53; the rest are from pp. 5–6

Gould presents his thesis more briefly in his essay “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (1997).

My title is derived from a verse of the patter song of Major-General Stanley, “And when I know precisely what is meant by ‘commissariat.’” Gould was a great admirer of the work of Gilbert and Sullivan: see his essay “The True Embodiment of Everything That’s Excellent: The Strange Adventure of Gilbert and Sullivan,” The American Scholar, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 35–49.

The Non-Consolations of Biology

A scientific theory that says nothing about the meaning, purpose, or value of human life is not for that reason a denial that there is any meaning, purpose, or value in human life.

Kenneth R. Miller reports being asked, after giving a public lecture on evolution, the following question by a member of the audience: “How can you tell me that I’m just an animal? How can you say that I’m no better than the beasts? That the only things that matter in life are to struggle, survive, and mate? There’s just got to be more to life than that” (Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 135).

It seems to me that such questions rest on the fallacy of moving from the premise “Biology says nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life” to the conclusion “Biology says that there is no value, meaning, or purpose to human life.” That this inference is fallacious I take to be obvious. Biology says nothing about these things because they are outside its bailiwick. They are not scientific matters at all. (In an earlier series of posts—“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion,” “More on Gould on Science and Religion,” and “A Dilemma for NOMA”—I subjected Stephen Jay Gould’s conception of “non-overlapping magisteria” to extensive criticism; but on this particular point, I have had no disagreement with him.)

Of course, people do not commit this fallacy concerning chemistry, say, or physics, which also say nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life. Perhaps that is because those sciences do not concern “life,” while biology does. And perhaps this is what made Miller’s questioner feel that he was being somehow diminished by the theory of evolution. But biology concerns “life” in the sense of what distinguishes organisms from the rest of nature and makes them all akin to one another, not in the specific sense of conscious human existence, with all its attendant aspirations.

This is presumably the very feature of biology that rubbed Miller’s questioner the wrong way: that biology regards human beings as just another species of living thing. But so does physics regard human beings as just so many physical things; chemistry, as so many chemical things. These sciences treat of “actions” and “reactions,” as biology treats of “life,” but they say nothing of what makes human actions and reactions, or human life, so much different from the merely physical, chemical, or biological sort, and so interesting to us. Questions of the value, meaning, or purpose of human life simply go unanswered in science. Why should anyone take that to imply that science, or one science in particular, gives a nihilistic answer to such questions?

Lewis Black on Creationism

Lewis Black explains why Christians get the “Old Testament” wrong. I explain how Black gets George W. Bush wrong—to some degree.

Here is another comedy clip, from Red, White, and Screwed, a video of Lewis Black in performance in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Once again, I have provided a transcript, so that those who like to remind themselves of the best bits, as I do, can have the words in print before them. And as in my previous posting of a clip of a comic in performance, of course, I advise all readers to watch the video before reading the transcript.

This performance took place during that dark age of recent American history known as the presidency of George W. Bush. The clip begins at a somewhat awkward point, in mid-sentence, omitting context that would allow the viewer to understand immediately what Black is talking about. I have therefore supplied, in the transcript that follows, the sentence and a half preceding the words with which the clip begins. (The complete version can be heard at 3:50 in this clip.)

I should have known earlier about President Bush, but I gave him some rope—a lot of rope, and then—he hung all of us with it. I should have known it when I heard him say, “When it comes to evolution, the jury is still out.” What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.

I never thought that during the course of my life, a president would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution, or at least kind of in the ball park of it, or thought m-m-m-maybe it’s got some MERIT! But NO! He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people—the Jewish people. And that book wasn’t good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, “No, we’ve got a better book, with a better character, you’re going to LOVE him!” And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!

And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there’s a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, because it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don’t quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY—I promise you this—will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.

Was the earth created in seven days? No. For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that’s because we know what we’re good at; and what we’re really good at is bullshit. This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would LOVE to have the FAITH to believe that it took place in seven days, but—I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.

And then, there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go, “Fossil!” And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

For me, the last paragraph, especially its last sentence, makes the whole speech worthwhile. But if the words preceding that line contain a serious error, does the worth of the speech as humor excuse it? I think not. Lewis Black is one of those comics whose performances largely owe their power to their truth. Of course, he often employs overstatement and fantasy, as around the middle of this excerpt; but he never, so far as I know, tries to pass them off as fact. So, as much as I relish making fun of the follies of Christian Biblical literalists and of former President Bush, I feel bound to correct Black’s lumping of the latter with the former.

Let us be clear that Black’s mention of the then-president at the beginning of the excerpt is mainly a transitional device, reflecting what he was saying just beforehand. He was talking about politics; now he wants to talk about the interpretation of Jewish scriptures by Christians, especially by those Christians who are Biblical literalists. Nonetheless, the excerpt begins with a misrepresentation of what President Bush, or rather, as he was at the time of uttering the words, presidential candidate Bush, said and meant. The utterance that Lewis Black approximately quotes was reported as follows in an article in The New York Times in October of 2000:

“From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life’s lessons. That’s what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true. I think that, for example, on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth. . . . I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” ¹

Black’s version incorporates a correction, probably made unwittingly, of the future president’s characteristic confusion of idiom. Bush seems to have conflated the idiomatic phrases “the jury is still out” and “a verdict has not yet been reached” into the mixed-up phrase “the verdict is still out.” This detail does not, however, affect the substance of the words quoted.

What does affect the substance is the remainder of the quotation, which makes Bush out to be less clearly on the side of Biblical literalism than Black would put him. In fact, it puts him on the other side entirely. Then-candidate Bush says explicitly that he does not take the Bible to be literally true in every particular, especially as an anticipation of “the findings of science.” He praises the Bible as a source of “strength and solace” and instruction in “life’s lessons,” and contrasts this with regarding it as a source of scientific knowledge.

One might go further in trying to separate Bush from Biblical literalists and creationists. For Bush does not exactly say that the jury (or the “verdict”) is still out on evolution itself but on “how God created the earth.” One might suggest that the “verdict” that he means is a theological conclusion on how God makes things happen from behind the scenes rather than a scientific one on how the earth and the living things on it came into being.

This, however, is exceedingly unlikely. Creationists have a notorious tendency to conflate questions of the origin of species with questions of the origin of the life, of the earth, and of the universe as a whole: “theory of evolution,” in their usage, often stands for all of these things. The construction of the quoted sentence shows the same confusion, or at least indicates that Bush is only concerned with the theory of evolution so far as it conflicts with the Biblical account of how the earth and what lives on it came into being. It is plainly on this conflict that he takes the jury to be “still out.” Finally, his words to a group of reporters five years later leave no room for doubt as to where he thought that there was room for doubt:

During a press conference with a group of Texas reporters on August 1, 2005, President George W. Bush responded to a question about teaching “intelligent design” in the public schools. The reporter referred to “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus ‘intelligent design’” and asked, “What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?” In response, Bush referred to his days as governor of Texas, when “I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” . . . Pressing the issue, the reporter asked, “So the answer accepts the validity of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolution?” Bush avoided a direct answer, construing the question instead as a fairness issue: “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”²

President Bush makes clear on this occasion that in his view the supposed “debate” concerning the theory of evolution and the so-called theory of intelligent design belongs within the curricula of public schools. It has to be presumed that he means that it belongs within the curricula of science classes, and therefore that he considers it to be a debate within science rather than a debate about science.

In sum, what George W. Bush said publicly does not indicate that he believes, following the Bible, that the earth was created in six days. In fact, it indicates clearly that he is not a Biblical literalist at all, and that he does not think that the Bible should be used as a basis for drawing conclusions in matters of science. However, his utterances also make clear that he considers the theory of evolution—meaning, in this instance, the whole enterprise of explaining speciation by reference to natural causes—to be a matter on which no scientific verdict has been reached.

REFERENCES

¹ Laurie Goodman, “The 2000 Campaign: Matters of Faith; Bush Uses Religion as Personal and Political Guide,” New York Times, October 22, 2000. Bold type added. A scan of the pertinent passage as it appeared in print can be seen here.

² Glenn Branch, “President Bush Addresses ‘Intelligent Design,’” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 25 (2005): 13–14. For equivalent reportage see Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005, or Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.

A Rough Introduction to Critical Thinking

A clip from the video Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny, with a partial transcript.

The clip embedded above is an excerpt from a video recording of Irish comic Dara Ó Briain (pronounced “dah-ra o-bree-an”) in performance at the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London in 2008. In this clip, he addresses himself to popular forms of ignorance and misunderstanding regarding matters of scientific knowledge (“a general kind of lack of knowledge about science,” as he says at 0:20). Ó Briain can be a bit rough on those who propagate defective forms of thinking (“Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves!”), and his performance, being stand-up comedy rather than a lecture, does not include much presentation of evidence pertinent to the evaluation of claims: hence my description of this as a “rough introduction” to critical thinking. But his act shares with critical thinking the aims of exposing folly and revealing truth.

Of course, a performance like this is made to be seen and heard, not to be read in transcribed form. Nonetheless, I find much of it so pithy and so well said that I like to have the words before my eyes. So by all means, watch the video before you read what follows. But once you have watched it, if you find Ó Briain’s words as well chosen as I do, you may want to refer to the following transcript of the stretch of this performance running from about 1:40 to 4:20.

But there’s a kind of notion that “Every opinion is equally valid.” My arse! Bloke who’s a professor of dentistry for forty years does not have a debate with some idiot [eejet] who removes his teeth with string and a door, right? It’s nonsense! And this happens all the time with medical stuff on the television. You’ll have a doctor on and they’ll talk to the doctor and be all “Doctor this” and “Doctor that,” and “What happened there?” and “Doctor, isn’t it awful?”, right? And then the doctor will be talking about something with all the benefit of research and medical evidence, and they’ll turn away from the doctor in the name of “balance,” and turn to some—quack—witch doctor—homeopath—horseshit peddler on the other side of the studio!

And I’m sorry if you’re into homeopathy. It’s water! How often does it need to be said? It’s just water. You’re healing yourself; why don’t you give yourself the credit? Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves, with the old “Well, science doesn’t know everything”! Well, science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop. But it’s aware of it, you know? Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

“Oh, well, the great thing about homeopathy is that you can’t overdose on it.” Well, you can fucking drown! I’m sorry: it seems harsh, and I used to be much more generous about it, but right now I would take homeopaths and I would put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers, and priests, and I’d close the top of the sack with string, and I’d hit them all with sticks. And I really wouldn’t worry who got the worst of the belt of the sticks, right? Anyone who in answer to the difficult questions in life, to “I don’t know what happens after I die,” or “Please, what happens after my loved ones die?” or “How can I stop myself dying?”—the big questions—gives them an easy bullshit answer, and you go, “Do you have any evidence for that?”, and they go, “There’s more to life than evidence”: get in the fucking sack!

I’m sorry, “Herbal medicine! Oh, herbal medicine’s been around for thousands of years!” Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became “medicine,” and the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out. “Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working.” Here’s the skinny on Chinese medicine: A hundred years ago the life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it’s not feckin’ tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn’t do much for the tiger either, if you don’t mind me pointing out.

There is one further joke at the expense of the Chinese before the next burst of laughter and applause from the audience, but I have omitted it, as I think it appears to disadvantage when transcribed.

Who Needs Science When You’ve Got the Bible?

And what hope is there for secular government when you’ve got Republicans?




Rep. John Shimkus (R., Illinois) is a candidate for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In a meeting of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on March 25, 2009, he opened a copy of the Bible and read passages from it, declaring them to be “the infallible word of God” and affirming on the basis of them that “the earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth.” He also said that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is a matter of “theological debate.” In the view of Mr. Shimkus, we must look to theology to answer questions of the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and to the Bible to answer questions of the earth’s future and of environmental policy.

Here is a transcript of Mr. Shimkus’s words, with my comments interjected (I have made available a transcript without the interruptions here):

The right of free speech is a great right that we have in this country, the very few times that we use it to espouse our theological or religious beliefs.

“The very few times” that we use the right of free speech to espouse our theological or religious beliefs?! I should think that this right is exercised by millions of Americans every day. But perhaps by “we” the Congressman means not “we Americans” but “we members of the US Congress,” or perhaps by “free speech” he means speaking in a session of a subcommittee of that body. Yes, it is a comparatively rare occurrence for members of Congress to argue for policy positions on the basis of Bible tags, and no wonder: the very same Constitutional amendment that guarantees us (the people, not just the members of Congress) the right of free speech forbids the US Congress to make any law respecting an establishment of religion.

But we do have members of the clergy here as members of the panel, so I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22.

Members of the clergy are present at a meeting of a congressional subcommittee, so let us read from the Bible: a curious reasoning. Mr. Shimkus seems to have been alluding to the fact that one of the witnesses before the committee on that day was Lutheran Bishop Callon Holloway, appearing on behalf of the National Council of Churches. The Bishop, according to the script of his testimony deposited in the records of the committee (PDF file), after mentioning that “for many people of faith, the conviction to be good stewards of the earth is grounded in God’s command in Genesis to keep and till the earth (Genesis 2:15),” made an argument for taking measures against global warming on purely secular grounds. But let us see how Mr. Shimkus argues:

“Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.

He is apparently reading from the New International Version. Notice that the second sentence begins with the qualification “As long as the earth endures.” It looks to me as if God left himself an “out” there. If we render our planet uninhabitable, then the earth will have ceased to endure; and God doesn’t say that he won’t prevent that from happening, does he? But the lameness of Shimkus’s biblical exegesis is the least of his absurdities. He continues:

The second verse comes from Matthew 24. “And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”

In the video, Mr. Shimkus’s manner of utterance makes it difficult to tell at what point he ceases to read and begins to speak in his own person; but one can confirm that the quotation ends here by looking up the passage (Matthew 24:31).

The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

My first thought when I read this was that destruction by a global flood is not exactly what we are concerned about. But then I reflected that one effect of global warming is a rise in sea levels; so perhaps Shimkus’s observation is not as irrelevant as it appears. If you think that the Bible gives us reliable information about the future of the earth, then this observation is relevant.

And I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith so that we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe that God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.

The term “persons of faith” seems to have come into vogue as a device for making the class of religious believers seem comparable to the class of so-called “persons of color,” as if the former were burdened by a comparable history of unfair treatment. I have not known the term to be used to mean “members of the clergy.” In any case, as I noted earlier, the one clergyman in the lineup that day, though he made brief use of what might be termed “theological discourse,” offered it only as an indication of the source of his ethical stance and not as infallible and perfect truth. The good bishop, unlike the bad congressman, understood that arguments from scripture had no rightful place in the deliberations of a committee of the US Congress.

Two other issues, Mr. Chairman. Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Actually, our atmosphere contains a million parts per million: all its parts are there! But presumably Mr. Shimkus means to speak of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. His figure of 388 ppm is indeed the scientifically established figure for the moment at which he was speaking, though in the year and a half since that time it has risen above 389 ppm (source).

I think in the age of the dinosaurs where we had most flora and fauna we were probably at 4,000 parts per million.

I don’t know if Mr. Shimkus thinks that “the age of the dinosaurs” was tens of millions of years ago or just a few thousand years ago. If he believes that it was millions of years ago, then it might be interesting to know how he reconciles this with his belief that the Bible is the infallible, unchangeable, and perfect word of God. If he believes that it was only thousands of years ago, it would be interesting to know why he accepts scientific findings that he thinks support his political position but rejects those that do not.

No, on second thought, to learn those things would probably not be very interesting at all.

Anyway, the figure of 4,000 ppm of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere is indeed true of a time in the age of dinosaurs; but it does not support Mr. Shimkus’s view that we need not worry about global warming. Quite the contrary. A recently published article confirms the findings to which he is presumably alluding:

The first direct evidence supporting the idea that a recently-discovered period of global warming, one of the hottest in Earth’s history, was caused by CO₂ has been published this week. Before the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO), which occurred 40 million years ago, temperatures were much higher than today, but steadily falling. . . .

Bijl’s team found clear evidence of MECO warming, and relatively high alkenone levels showed similar temperature and CO₂ profiles, with a matching peak in each. They found that the baseline CO₂ levels in the broader Eocene period [about 40 million years ago] were around 1000 to 2000 parts per million (ppm). During the temperature peaks atmospheric CO₂ levels reached 4000 ppm or higher, backing the theory of the greenhouse gas cause. By comparison, current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have grown from around 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to almost 390 ppm today. (“Prehistoric CO2 double-up gives warming data,” at Simple Climate, November 6, 2010)

So, yes, the concentration of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere was indeed once ten times as high as it is now: and the average temperature was higher by 4°C. That may have been fine for dinosaurs, but it would be dire for us human beings.

Shimkus adds:

There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon. And the cost of a cap and trade on the poor is now being discovered.

He goes on to remark on the economic costs of the cap-and-trade legislation. I have no idea if his claims have any merit. Whether they do or not, at least they are arguments from empirical facts rather than from supposed divine promises revealed in scripture. But how on earth (if you’ll pardon the expression) the discipline of theology is supposed to be able to deliver findings on whether the earth has “too much” carbon I have no idea. Does Shimkus even understand that the question pertinent to the deliberations of his committee is not whether there is too much carbon in or on the earth—that is something that, so far as I understand, has changed very little since the planet was formed—but whether there is too much carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and what should be done about it? Does he have any idea what he is talking about? Does he care at all whether he does or not?

Perhaps it doesn’t make much difference whether people derive their dogmatic idiocies from the Bible or from other sources. But it is peculiarly unsettling to see persons of influence in the US government invoking scripture as a basis—and not just any basis but one that is “infallible, unchanging, [and] perfect”—of beliefs about the natural environment and the effects of our actions upon it.

Related articles:

“Energy Committee Chairman Candidate Says Bible Shows No Catastrophic Climate Change Can Occur,” at Center for Inquiry, November 10, 2010

“‘The planet won’t be destroyed by global warming because God promised Noah,’ says politician bidding to chair U.S. energy committee,” at Mail Online, November 10, 2010

A Dilemma for NOMA

The diversity of religions presents a stubborn problem for Gould’s idea that religion has its own magisterium. The idea that the teaching authority of religion pertains to practices rather than beliefs shifts the problem slightly but ultimately does not solve it. On the other hand. . . .

 Stephen Jay Gould on The Simpsons (episode 908, “Lisa the Skeptic”)

To people who, like me, are neither religious nor anti-religious, Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis of non-overlapping magisteria (“NOMA”) holds considerable appeal.¹ To recapitulate it for the benefit of anyone not already familiar with it, this is the thesis that science has “teaching authority” with regard to questions of how the natural world works, while religion has such authority with regard to questions of ultimate meaning and value. I have argued in my two previous posts on the topic (“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion” and “More on Gould on Science and Religion”) that, while a plausible rationale can be suggested for Gould’s account of the magisterium of science, his account of the magisterium of religion faces serious difficulties. Not only is it questionable whether religion has teaching authority in the domain that Gould assigns to it, but it is questionable whether religion has teaching authority in any domain whatever. In short, it is to be doubted whether there is any such thing as “the magisterium of religion.”

This conclusion can be reached by either of two ways of looking at the matter. The first way is to note the logical disparity between how the non-count noun “religion” relates to the count noun “religions” and the manner in which the corresponding nouns “science” and “sciences” relate to each other. A science is simply the science of a particular subject matter, and all sciences are parts of science. For all the differences of method and content among them, there is no incompatibility between one science and another. There are conflicts between theories within the various sciences, but the work of science consists largely in resolving such conflicts. Religions, by contrast, do not belong to a coherent whole. Different religions do not relate to one another as different sciences do, as parts of a whole, but in something closer to how one scientific theory relates to another theory concerning the same subject matter, that is, by mutual incompatibility. As a rule, one cannot coherently combine the teachings of one religion with the teachings of another. (I include the qualification “as a rule” not because I know of two religions that can be combined in this way but simply because I do not know that there are no two that can be so combined.)

From these reflections it emerges how dubious Gould’s attribution of teaching authority to religion is. Remember that his thesis is not that each religion has its magisterium, but that religion itself, in kind, has a magisterium. He elaborates what this means in the following passage:

Each domain of inquiry frames its own rules and admissible questions, and sets its own criteria for judgment and resolution. These accepted standards, and the procedures developed for debating and resolving legitimate issues, define the magisterium—or teaching authority—of any given realm. (Rocks of Ages, 52–3)

This passage seems perfectly adequate to characterize science as a domain of inquiry; it may also be applicable to the domains of individual religions, considered separately, and perhaps even to the procedures of some ecumenical religious councils. But applied to the entity “religion” in general, it is a non-starter. Religion considered in kind, as contrasted with individual religions, plainly has none of the attributes that Gould describes as constituting a magisterium.

Another way to arrive at the same conclusion is to consider the following dilemma. Take the body of beliefs that are taught by a given religion. Either that body of beliefs is founded in reason and experience—or in “natural reason,” as Thomas Aquinas would call it—or it is not. If it is, then there is no room for any specifically religious authority with regard to it: it falls within the magisterium of science, perhaps supplemented by (secular) philosophy. If, on the other hand, the body of beliefs is not founded in reason and experience, then no authority—that is, no power to determine the truth or falsehood of the beliefs—is possible with regard to it. At most, a political authority may determine what beliefs may be professed, and legislate penalties for heterodoxy. (I believe that this arrangement has been tried: it was called the middle ages, was it not?) Either way, there is no such thing as a specifically religious teaching authority. Therefore, there is no such thing as the magisterium of religion.

Those are the two arguments. What they have in common, besides their conclusion, is that they make use of two facts, (1) the incompatibilites among the teachings of different religions and (2) the unavailability of any specifically religious way—or perhaps it would be better to say generically religious way: i.e., a way belonging to religion in kind and not to any individual religion—of resolving those divergences of teaching. From these the conclusion is drawn that no teaching authority pertains to religion as such.

As with any well-formed argument, criticism of this one can focus either on the truth of premises or on their sufficiency to warrant the conclusion. Take premise 1 first—the assertion of the incompatibility among the teachings of different religions. There are those, like the present Dalai Lama, who like to emphasize what the world’s religions have in common and what adherents of one religion can learn from other religions.² But, so far as I know, not even those who believe in a common core of the world’s religious teachings deny the diversity and incompatibility among the less central elements. Nor is it evident that these disagreements are merely peripheral. The teaching that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate is central to the Christian religion, while Jews and Muslims stoutly deny it. Disagreement of beliefs among the world’s religions is not a mere appearance to be explained away but an undeniable and unalterable fact.

What, then, about premise 2, the unavailability of any system of standards or procedures for adjudicating conflicts of belief among the world’s religions? Might one hold that such a system is not impossible but merely not yet formulated, or that it already exists and merely wants development? It is not easy to refute such vague and speculative suppositions. This much, however, can be said. First, the only known body of standards or procedures that can be applied to religious claims is the one that makes up the composite body of what we call scientific method, logic, and common sense. The existence of such a body of standards and procedures plainly provides no support to the idea of a specifically religious form of teaching authority. Second, if there is a body of standards or procedures belonging specifically to religion, no one has yet produced it; so to invoke it to establish the existence of a religious magisterium is as vain as to call upon a phantom to clean one’s house.

The premises of the argument, then, seem unassailable. This leaves only the question of their sufficiency to establish the conclusion. And here, as I suggested in my previous post on this topic, there is a bit of wiggle room. To begin with, suppose that we separate the idea of teaching from that of belief or truth claim. After all, there are plainly forms of teaching that have nothing to do with imparting beliefs: teaching someone how to cook a soufflé or how to play cards, for instance. The application to religion is not hard to see: religious life is manifestly not a mere matter of belief, but also, arguably even primarily, of observance. Religions are first of all practiced; to speak of “believing” a religion is surely a rather late, and I suspect a specifically Protestant, development in the grammar of religious language.

The idea here is not that religious teaching does not include religious beliefs, but that religious teaching authority does not extend to such beliefs. As far as religious authority is concerned, religious beliefs are, on this view, epiphenomena of religious practices. The incompatibility between one religion and another is then less like the logical incompatibility between two propositions than it is like the physical incompatibility between being in one location and being in another, separate location. That is, one person cannot coherently maintain two or more distinct religious practices (or at least, cannot do so in general); nonetheless, if two people practice two different religions, their mere practices are not in any inherent conflict, but only such practical conflict as may arise from circumstances.

Some people, I suspect, will find this idea far-fetched and bizarre. For my part, I find it very attractive, and I suspect that anyone who finds it unworthy of serious consideration is simply accustomed to the Protestant conception of religion as essentially a matter of belief. Still, there is no denying that it is strange, and, what is more to the point, I suspect that it fails to solve the problem at hand. The reason is that, even if we set aside the logical incompatibility between religions by making practices rather than beliefs the objects of religious authority, we still have the problem of diversity in those practices. Each religion teaches a particular practice: there is no common practice or body of practices that religion itself teaches. In fact, it is not clear that there is anything that religion itself teaches: there are only the diverse teachings of different religions. The fact of religious diversity remains a problem for the idea of a religious magisterium.

There remains, so far as I can see, one possible way out for NOMA. I have presumed so far that, where a “teaching authority” exists, only one possible teaching can be authorized. Would it make sense to suppose that mutually incompatible beliefs, and perhaps also mutually exclusive practices, can all be authorized within religion? A magisterium, according to Gould, comprises standards and procedures for “debating and resolving legitimate issues.” Well, then: why assume that incompatibilities between one religion and another are legitimate issues? Perhaps the only legitimate religious issues are doctrinal (and perhaps also practical) differences within a religion. Gould’s idea, then, would be that there is a common body of procedures or standards for resolving religious disputes, but it concerns only disputes within a religion, not between one religion and another. Disputes between religions are then not legitimate religious issues, but if anything secular issues, to be resolved on non-religious grounds if at all.

This conception of the magisterium of religion is one that I have not seen considered elsewhere. Perhaps, after I post this, I will find some fatal weakness in it, but for now, I offer it for consideration.

REFERENCES

¹See Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999) and “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (1997).

²Tenzin Gyatso (the Fourteenth Dalai Lama), “Many Faiths, One Truth,” The New York Times, May 25, 2010.

---

Previous entry: More on Gould on Science and Religion

Next entry: Jewish Education in America: A Historical Note

More on Gould on Science and Religion

The criticisms that have been directed at Gould’s thesis of non-overlapping magisteria (for science, questions of how the natural world is; for religion, questions of ultimate meaning and value) can be reduced to one objection: Why should we believe that religion has any magisterium at all?

Stephen Jay Gould (source)

As I explained in a previous entry (“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion”), Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis that science and religion have “non-overlapping magisteria” (“NOMA”) is meant neither as a description of the actual scope of claims made by practitioners of science and religion nor as a proposal for how those two activities can stay out of each other’s way, but rather as an account of the range within which each of the two has “teaching authority.” Science, on Gould’s view, has such authority with regard to questions of how the natural world works, and religion with regard to questions of ultimate meaning and value. There is, according to Gould, no conflict between science and religion as such, because their respective domains, though they adjoin each other, do not overlap. Claims about the natural world made on the supposed authority of religion as well as claims about ultimate meaning and value made on the supposed authority of science are one and all void.

Interestingly, while many defenders of science have been highly critical of Gould’s thesis, their principal complaint has been not that it grants too little to science (though some have made this objection: more on that on another occasion) but that it grants too much to religion. The objection is that, even if questions of ultimate meaning and value lie outside the competence of science, it does not follow that they lie within the competence, much less the exclusive competence, of religion. After all, such questions are and always have been prominent concerns of the discipline of philosophy. To hold that they can only be resolved by reliance on religious sources is itself a substantive philosophical position, and an unpopular one among professional philosophers at that.

At the same time, as I noted in my previous entry, these critics find fault with Gould for drawing the boundaries of religious authority in an implausibly utopian fashion. To hold, as Gould does, that such authority pertains only to questions of ultimate meaning and value and not to questions of natural fact excludes a vast body of actual religious claims, such as the historical narratives on which the Abrahamic religions depend. Gould’s assertion that the conflict between science and religion “exists only in people’s minds and social practices, not in the logic or proper utility of these entirely different, and equally vital, subjects” (Rocks of Ages, 3) requires so vast a disparity between the supposed “logic or proper utility” of religion and how religion “exists . . . in people’s minds and social practices” as to make his conception appear more wishful thinking than historical or philosophical analysis. In the satirical summation cited by Daniel Dennett, the thesis of NOMA says in effect: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which Caesar says God can have.” In other words, while Gould’s formulations make a show of giving to science and to religion each their respective shares, in effect it only allows to religion a portion of what is left over after science has done its work.

In this light it is all the more remarkable that religionists (if that is the term for those who follow some religion or other) who have commented on Gould’s thesis seem to be content with his delineation of the religious magisterium. Yet it is not difficult to guess the reason for this. Presumably, it is only the exponents of modern, liberal, intellectually catholic (with a small “c”) interpretations of religion—religionists well up in secular learning, who will not feel pinched or chafed by the strictures of NOMA—who have anything to say about Gould. For them, the role of the defender of the faith in relation to scientific findings that conflict with traditional beliefs is not to refute those findings but to reinterpret the tradition to accommodate them. By contrast, creationists and other religious reactionaries, who take their favored scriptures or clerics to be authoritative for all time and in all questions whatever, are not likely to pay attention to what an evolutionary biologist—a proponent of the hated doctrine of “Darwinism,” which they equate with atheism—has to say about the proper scope of religious claims. It’s either that, or I just haven’t heard their grumblings because they have not carried beyond their closed circle of communicants.

So, to sum up, the objections to Gould’s thesis of NOMA are (1) that it grants religion an authority that it lacks in questions of ultimate meaning and value, and (2) that, however attractive it may be as an ideal scheme, it is too remote from the actual practice of religion to be credible. Alternatively, one can sum up all the criticisms that have been directed at Gould’s thesis by defenders of science in one rhetorical question: By what right does Gould assume that religion has teaching authority about anything? Why, in other words, should we believe that religion has any magisterium at all?

There is an evident contrast with science on this point. Science, one could argue, is defined by a body of methods that can be derived from the inherent requirements of human epistemic rationality. Thus the definition of science—not the definition of the word “science” but the rule by which in practice science is identified—explains why science has the magisterium that it has, and a fortiori why it has any magisterium at all. Science has teaching authority with regard to how the world is because its methods are derived from the requirements for learning about how the world is. This is true not only of science as a whole but of any particular science. Particular sciences are individuated not as competing claims (there are competing claims in the sciences, but there is a commonly accepted methodology for adjudicating among them), but as the science of this or that particular subject matter.

With religion, things stand on an entirely different footing. The various religions of the world are not parts of a whole called “religion” except as a matter of verbal classification. As far as their beliefs are concerned, religions are not complementary at all but conflicting, and there is no common method or practice or principle of operation among them by appeal to which differences of doctrine can be resolved. Gould defines a magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (Rocks of Ages, 3). It may be fair to say that religion or the religious mode of teaching, whatever exactly that may be, holds the tools for meaningful discourse, but resolving differences of belief is precisely what it cannot do. Each religion may contain the tools for resolving internal doctrinal disputes, but no religion contains the tools for resolving differences between religions, except to the utterly parochial satisfaction of its particular adherents; much less does the abstract generic entity “religion” possess any such tools. Thus, while the existence and extent of the magisterium of science can be derived from the nature of science, consideration of the nature of religion only makes it difficult to sustain the claim that religion has any magisterium at all.

There is, I think, a way out of this, both for Gould and for religion. In making the case for the pedagogical incompetence of religion—the non-existence of anything that can be called its magisterium—I relied on a restriction of religious teaching to beliefs, or truth claims. If religious teaching is essentially concerned with telling us how things are, whether in “this” world (as if there were another) or in some putative world beyond it, then, I think, Gould’s atheistic critics are surely right, and religion has no teaching authority at all. But the assumption that religious teaching concerns beliefs may be called into question. Religion may have teaching authority with regard to something—I am not venturing to say what—that is not essentially a matter of belief at all. Another possibility is that the proper task and scope of religion is not captured by the idea of a magisterium. I hope to explore these possibilities in another entry.

* * *

Correction, added June 10, 2010: I overstated matters in my final paragraph, above, when I equated the non-existence of a religious magisterium with the “pedagogical incompetence” of religion. To lack teaching authority is not the same as to lack competence to teach. Any religion is competent to teach what it will, in the sense that there is nothing inherent in religion as such that prevents given religious teachings from being authorized by some non-parochial standard. But the only non-parochial standards available are (as the term suggests) non-religious ones. Thus, for instance, the fact that certain histories offered in the Bible are incorporated into Jewish or Christian doctrine does not render those histories rationally untenable. The point is merely that their religious status does not confer any authority on them either: whether they are true or false can and must be settled by the same standards as any other historical claims.

---

Previous entry: Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion

Next entry:  A Dilemma for NOMA