Speak of the devil

Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time,  suggests in the NY Times today: Let’s go Godless for the rest of the campaign. He quotes Kennedy thus:

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” And, “I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair.”

He continues:

That was John F. Kennedy, of course, sounding light years removed from Mitt Romney, who declared this year that “freedom requires religion,” and Mike Huckabee, who called himself a “Christian leader” and advocated amending the Constitution to follow Biblical principles. Both men are being touted as running mates for McCain.

“Where we are today is almost the antithesis of Kennedy’s time,” said David Domke, a professor of communications at the University of Washington and co-author, with Kevin Coe, of “The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.”

“It’s the verbal equivalent of an American flag lapel pin: few notice if you do it, but many notice if you don’t,” Domke and Coe wrote in a recent essay in Time.

At a meeting with prominent Christian leaders on Tuesday, Obama discussed his “personal journey of faith,” as one participant recounted. That, alone, goes against Kennedy’s dictum of keeping it private.

Teddy Roosevelt, a McCain hero, was prescient on this point as well. He argued against putting, “In God We Trust,” on the currency in 1907, saying it cheapens the divine. “It not only does no good,” he wrote, “but it does positive harm.”

Read the whole column here: http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/godless/

I was interested in one comment on Egan’s blog that asked, are we concerned about the separation of church and state or the separation of religion and state? Is it acceptable for candidates for office, or for elected officials to express religious sentiments, and if so, when? And is it reasonable to expect that candidates or officials will not express religious sentiments if they happen to have religious beliefs?

We are very sensitive to religious speech, especially by those we don't agree with. The common term innsh'Allah sticks out of a Muslim's speech just the way "the will of God" sticks out of a Christian fundamentalist's. But listen to yourself talk sometime. It is hard to get through the day without making some kind of religious or Biblical reference in everyday speech. We say “Thank God,” to express relief or “Go to Hell,” when we get pissed off. We speak easily of Heaven and paradise, Pearly Gates, The Devil made me do it,” etc, etc. Where is the line we ask candidates not to cross?

All smoke; little fire

Having slogged through the swamp that is Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson’s prodigeous novel of Vietnam, I am unfortunately confirmed in the judgment from my Feb. 24 posting. Johnson does a remarkably good job of seeing the world through the constricted first person narrator viewpoints of the various lowlife characters, many of whom apparently cannot think far beyond the world immediately before them. That’s a great talent for any writer, though he trashes the carefully wrought effect from time to time by injecting the omniscient narrator unexpectedly to no apparent purpose other than to jerk the reader out of the story and remind him that Denis Johnson is writing this book.

I’m sure the author would squirm to hear this, but this is a Pynchon-esque book in search of Thomas Pynchon. It is the book Pynchon could have written about Vietnam if he’d wanted to. That’s not necessarily to praise the book. Pynchon’s later books have been flabby at best. (I enjoyed Mason & Dixon better as a song by Mark Knopfler – the title song of the Sailing to Philadelphia CD – than in print.) But even his pallid later characters have a vigor that Johnson can’t seem to crank up in his personae. They approach the threshold of outrageously bizarre behavior and you think, “this time he’s going over the edge,” only to watch them fall back into the ordinary time after time, but not quite far enough to be ordinary realistic characters. They exist in a netherworld of smoke.

The myth of progress

The NY Times published this chart recently purporting to show that progress, from evolution to technology, increases its pace logarithmically over time.  But is the argument "things are changing faster and faster" really true?  It seems to me that the argument suffers from the recency effect.  The chart above for example graphs the development of the computer and the personal computer as two separate and apparently equal bits of progress data.  But in 100 years or 1,000 years will anyone make such a distinction?  

Sure, there has been a lot of technical change since WWII -- atomic power, jet plane, space travel, computer, DNA, cell phone, etc., but progress has a pretty good run between the invention of the first telescope in 1600 and the microscope in 1665, too. That period included the invention of calculus independently by Newton and Leibnitz, Newton's definition of gravity, Galileo's description of the solar system, the discovery of the refraction of light and the circulation of blood.

Or how about the period 1833 to 1896 from the time the Pottawatomie ceded the area around the mouth of the Chicago river to the U.S. and the Chicago World's Fair?  During that period, the indestructable northern forests were destroyed. The endless buffalo herds were ended. The native Americans lost two-thirds of the continent.  The time required to travel from New York to Chicago was reduced from two week to 12 hours.  The telegraph and electric light were invented. At the beginning of the period, all food was whole, fresh and local.  By the end, people were eating out of cans and beef was being shipped from Kansas to New York in refrigerated train cars.

How fast change moves depends on what data points you consider significant. The more recent the event, the more likely it is to be considered significant. Even evolution doesn't necessarily move faster.  I'm sure a trilobite from 500 million years ago would have seen a great deal more significance in the variations among other trilobites than we admit today. Which is not to say that progress doesn't happen or that some times foster progress and change more than others. But how many years will have to pass before some future progress-ologist lumps "the evolution of mammals" into one big event?

More joy of spring

This photo is from about 2:30 this morning. Kate finally had her foal - on her own birthday and her previous foal Maya's birthday.  Something about June 6 just appeals to that horse.  As usual, it was a dark and stormy night. Susan didn't get much sleep.

The God of physics part 3

Dave sends these thoughts on the difference between physics and biology by Joseph Wood Krutch from his 1949 book The Twelve Seasons.

I can understand how an astronomer may conclude that God is a mathematician. The planets seem to know where they are going and what they are about. Theirs is a formal, unvarying dance with moves in accord with an abstract scheme of delightful regularity; and the mathematical physicist seems to have discovered that the microcosm is, despite the disturbing presence of certain principles suggesting indeterminacy, a good deal like its big brother of heavenly bodies.

But the world of living things exhibits no such cooperation of part with part, no such subordination of the unit to the whole. The God who planned the well working machines of atomand solar system seems to have had no part in arranging the curiously inefficient society of plants and animals in which everything works against everything else; and the struggle between, let us say, the mouse which would continue its species and the owl which would feed its young goes on inconclusively, millennium after millennium.

No one, it seems to me, who has ever watched the contest between two weeds for a few square inches of soil; no one who has seen the intricate history of the one, from seed to leaf, come to nothing -- can possibly suppose that so wasteful a game of cross-purposes was deliberately devised by the astronomer's mathematical God, or indeed by the intelligence which knew what it wanted. If God made a world of atoms and suns, then perhaps life intruded itself unexpectedly upon unity, through some will of its own, multiplicity on unity, conflict on balance. The individual plant or animal is no doubt marvelously contrived to achieve its purposes, but the society of living things is an anarchy in which events may work themselves out to this conclusion or that - but over which no unity of purpose seems to preside.

Krutch was not only a keen observer of nature, but also a literary lion of his time. He wrote the introduction, for example, to the 1934 Random House edition of Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past. There’s an interesting biography on this site devoted to pantheism: http://home.utm.net/pan/krutch.htm

Dark thoughts

This column by Brian Greene ran on Sunday June 1, 2008 in the NY Times and was among the most popular stories for several days. It’s in praise of science as a way of understanding the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01greene.html.  Greene’s main point was this: 

The reason science really matters is that science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

 I was thinking of that in light of Yi-Fu Tuan’s comments (see May 21 post) that biologists see the world as messy and without meaning, perhaps from peering at all that junk DNA, while physicists are led to see the world as a magical creation of some kind of god because of the marvelously beautiful mathematical formulae that seem to inform its structure with an inner order. Then I read this in Tuesday’s Times and now I don’t know what to think:

Dark, Perhaps Forever
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

Through myriad techniques and observations, cosmologists have recently arrived, after decades of strife, at a robust but dark consensus regarding a cosmos in which stars and galaxies, as well as the humans who gawk at them, amount to barely more than a disputatious froth. It was born 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang. By weight it is 4 percent atoms and 22 percent so-called dark matter of unknown identity — perhaps elementary particles that will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider starting up outside Geneva this year. That leaves 74 percent for the weight of whatever began causing the cosmos to accelerate about five billion years ago.

As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know. Some physicists are even willing to burn down their old sainted Einstein and revise his theory of gravity, general relativity, to make the cosmic discrepancies go away. There is in fact a simple explanation for the dark energy, Dr. Witten pointed out, one whose tangled history goes all the way back to Einstein, but it is also the most troubling.

“Dark energy has the somewhat unusual property that it was embarrassing before it was discovered,” he said.

In 1917, Einstein invented a fudge factor known as the cosmological constant, a sort of cosmic repulsion to balance gravity and keep the universe in balance. He abandoned his constant when the universe was discovered to be expanding, but quantum physics resurrected it by showing that empty space should be foaming with energy that had the properties of Einstein’s constant.

“Before the discovery of the dark energy, quantum physicists tended to assume that the ‘vacuum’ we live in has some deep meaning that reflects nature’s deepest secrets,” Dr. Witten said. But if ours is only one of a zillion in a haystack, there is nothing special about it, no secret to be found.

You can read all about it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03dark.html?

What do you think? Dark or not?

Darwin worse than abortion

Maybe you saw the news release:

Evangelicals say ACLU is Top Threat to Nation’s Spiritual Health.

The American Civil Liberties Union was ranked the top threat to America's spiritual wellbeing in an informal write-in survey of American evangelicals recently conducted by Coral Ridge Ministries, a Christian media outreach.

More than 13,000 Christians across America responded to CRM's 2008 Spiritual State of the Nation Survey, distributed in January, assesses where pro-family Christians stand on a wide range of social, economic, and moral issues. Pro-homosexual indoctrination, abortion, Islamic terrorism, and Hollywood rounded out the listing of top threats to America 's spiritual health.

Nothing surprising there – 99 percent agreement across the board – but I thought it interesting (and statistically significant) that the Evangelicals believe it’s more critical to squelch Darwinian teaching than to extirpate abortion.

13. How important is it that America outlaw abortion?
[80%] Critical [12%] Important

16. How important is it that schools teach evolution as a theory rather than a fact—and include evidence for Intelligent Design?

[83%] Critical [9%] Important

Coral Ridge Ministries is the radio and television outreach of Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches more than three million people weekly through more than 750 radio outlets, more than 600 TV stations, and its website, www.coralridge.org.

There were no questions asking whether the nation’s spiritual or civic health might be in danger from the twisted theology and political perversions of certain seminaries, so I guess we’ll never know how those dangers rank. But the survey’s not that far wrong from the radical believer’s point of view.

Darwin, of course, started out as a Christian, educated in theology at Cambridge and teased by his shipmates aboard the Beagle for his Bible-quoting piety, and he continued to cite a divine creator in all his work, but it might not be the creator the Coral Ridge folks believe in.

Says David Quammen in The Reluctant Mr. Darwin:

The existence of god, any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant, is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of man, the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of god, special rights and responsibilities on earth. That’s where Darwin runs afoul of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and probably most other religions on the planet.

In plain language: a soul or no soul? An afterlife or not? Are humans spiritually immortal in a way that chickens and cows aren’t, or just another form of temporarily animated meat? Today we tend to overlook this horrible challenge implied by Darwin’s idea. Theistic evolution has supposedly made the theory safe for people of all faiths.