Breakthrough evidence for string theory?

Having always been a fan of cosmology, and especially the cyclic model, a recent New Scientist article on the giant "hole" in the universe and how it may support string theory caught my eye. I took the time to scan and upload it so that you can read it too: here (.pdf, 3.1 MB).

On a roll

Two good articles to share with you.

Last month's Economist had a special section "In God's Name" (I've scanned all 18 pages, 3.6 MB, here as a .pdf). Most of the article is "meh" but I liked the refutation of the common claim that Europe is becoming "Eurabia" with some sort of huge takeover by Muslims. They point out:

The second part—the imminent arrival of Eurabia—can be dismissed as poor mathematics. Muslim minorities in Europe are indeed growing fast and causing political friction, but they account for less than 5% of the total population, a tiny proportion by American standards of immigration. Even if that proportion trebles in the next 20 years, Eurabia will still be a long way off.

The more interesting question is whether Christianity will recover. A new book by Philip Jenkins on European religion comes up with some gloomy statistics. Only 20% of Europeans say that God plays an important role in their lives, compared with 60% of Americans. A survey in 2004 found that only 44% of Britons believed in God, whereas 35% (45% among 18-34-year-olds) denied His existence. Only 15% of them go to church each week, against 40% of Americans. Even in the Catholic heartlands of Spain, Italy and Ireland attendance rates have dropped below 20%. And priests are dying out: in Dublin, home to 1m Catholics, precisely one was ordained in 2004.

There's much more there to be read, so take a peek.

Secondly, in between the trite mushiness of the New Scientist article from September and the no-holds-barred hard-ass atheism of the AA article by Whittenberger analyzing the logic of the atonement, we find a very worth-reading editorial in New Scientist from 11/10/07, "The Trouble with Reason," and an article, "God's Place in a Rational World."

The article is hosted at the Beyond Belief 2.0 conference website, and covers the event and its context (check out the new videos from the homepage). One of the funnier miscellany had to be the guy who wrote my university physical chemistry text, Peter Atkins, actually having said that atheist scientists should adopt a flag with a Mandelbrot Set on it...oh my. A flag. With a Mandelbrot Set. Wow.

Anyway, one of the things I liked the most with this new article was the focus on the issue of morality and its relationship to empiricism/scientism/science. The question of the evolutionary history and evolutionary purposes of morality are certainly fair game for science. However, jettisoning ethical philosophy because it is non-empirical or pretending that science is sufficient to deal with morality (scientism) are just plain irrational. A few good points were made that help to temper the red-hot passion for the elimination of religion; as Edward Slingerland said:

• Religion is not going away anytime soon (or maybe ever)


• Humans' rights & morality are just as unscientific in nature as God: I've written reams (much of it rambling and repetitive, I'm sure, of what others have already said on the topic) on trying to get my head around morality, and I don't know if I've succeeded or not. Judge for yourself: 1, 2
  

Irrespective of the difficulty in approaching morality from a scientific viewpoint, we have no choice but to analyze morality with the tools of reason and logic available to us. If we can find some way to explain morality as a "bet fit model" that simply shows us a way to live that ends up benefiting all of us to the greatest extent possible, then that's fine for me. It doesn't have to be metaphysically ultimate, as I used to wish. If ethics can just be objectively good, I'll be happy.

Lots of scientists are apparently starting to realize this second point by Slingerland, and embrace some forms of "spirituality" in order to explain issues like human meaning & morality given the vacuum left in those areas by science. As to the first point, it seems that Dawkins and all these other guys are still dreaming: religion will be with us as long as art and poetry and beauty will be -- a way to capture the human forms of transcendence and abstractions/ideals we're capable of seeing, but rarely attaining. Religion is beautiful when it's like that, like the dream we don't want to wake up from. On the other hand, atheism has a bit of a "cost" attached with it.

When you look at Atkins' proposal of an atheist "flag" and Kelly's interest in "ending religion," you see that atheists are really on a roll. And that roll is downhill. There is indeed a problem with atheism. Thankfully, the problems with fundamentalist religion are much more grave; deadly, in fact.

The Science of Climate Change

So I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth -- rented it from the UF Library West, in fact.

While I had already heard many of the climate change skeptics' arguments, and I was already aware of the consensus position, one particular thing jumped out at me from the film: the study cited by Gore, performed by Naomi Oreskes, which purportedly summarizes the scientific consensus on the issue by finding 0 out of 928 papers disagreeing with the consensus position. Here is a long excerpt of the article in Science:

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

To be fair, Richard Lindzen followed this study up with an op-ed criticizing the methodology, but so far as I know, there is no counterargument that relies upon an examination of the literature like hers. Lindzen pointed out there are only 905 abstracts available (not 928), and that the consensus position is only explicitly endorsed in 13 of these abstracts.

Pretty stark, eh?

Also see New Scientist, Real Climate, and the science page at Al Gore's site.

Mutually Exclusive Ideologies

Two things that can only exterminate one another:

• Scientific progress (a .pdf primer on astrobiology)-- HT: Bad Astronomy



• Theocratic regress (a Harper's article on Fundy-driven historical revisionism by Jeff Sharlet) -- HT: Hallq
  

________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state, Philosophy

Journal Article Researching Deconversion

A friend pointed me to a journal article by Heinz Streib studying deconversion experiences:

"The Variety of Deconversion Experiences - Contours of a Concept in Respect to Empirical Research" (co-author: Keller, Barbara), in: Archive for the Psychology of Religion / Archiv für Religionspsychologie 26: 181-200 (2004) (.pdf)

My comments will be placed below the fold.

The author reflects the lack of research done on deconversions, and I like his outline for clarifying the concept itself:

It may however be important for understanding the process of deconversion to attend to the loss of specific religious experiences which deconverts talk about in their interviews. The loss of religious experiences, or the attraction to a new kind of religious experience, may be an element of deconversion which occurs as early in the deconversion process and are as important for this process as intellectual doubt and denial or moral criticism.

Thus we may add this to our list of elements in our conceptualization of deconversion.

We conclude the interindividual commonalities of deconversion with an extended list of definition elements.

Deconversion consists in:

1. Loss of specific religious experiences (Experiential Dimension); this means the loss of finding meaning and purpose in life; the loss of the experience of God; of trust and of fear;
2. Intellectual doubt, denial or disagreement with specific beliefs (Ideological Dimension); heresy (sensu Berger) is an element of deconversion;
3. Moral criticism (Ritualistic Dimension) which means a rejection of specific prescriptions and/or the application of a new level of moral judgement;
4. Emotional suffering (Consequential Dimension); this can consist in a loss of embeddedness/social support/sense of stability and safety;
5. Disaffiliation from the community which can consist of a retreat from participation in meetings or from observance of religious practices; finally, the termination of membership which eventually follows.

These interindividual commonalities of deconversion can be used to structure empirical research, and as criteria of what characterizes biographical accounts as deconversion stories.

I just find #1 rather problematic if it is not taken as an "interindividual commonality" - something which may not be shared coequally amongst deconvert groups. After all, many of us would argue that the phrase, "God has purpose for my life" is meaningless and inspired much confusion as a believer, and that self-ownership follows from, and is necessary for, one to evaluate the value/meaning/purpose of ones own life.

The implicit association here is between deconversion and ultimate loss, rather than temporary transition, in values and purposes. That is fallacious. All of us go through changes in the way we view our purposes and meaning whether we apostasize, remain Christian, or never become one. Life and its experiences bring us new perspectives, and it is rare (if not impossible) for people to be able to live in an existential vacuum.