Yesterday, WIRED note its largest reader response "in memory" to a piece they published entitled The Church of the Non-Believers on beliefs of the "New Atheists" or, as they call themselves, "Brights". Other media, such as the NY Times and Washington Post have had similar specials on "faith" with huge reader response.
These issues permeate our lives and affect our behavior in major ways. One reason they are so visible lately is that the beliefs of Islam appear to be motivating some people to violent actions that have the US on the receiving end. These seem to be more visible within the US than violence inspired by Christianity for which the US or the West was on the delivering end, some of which occurred years or centuries ago.
Then, added to this mix of those calling for unbelievers to repent or die, come the New Atheists, who say "pox on both your houses", and, naturally, call for the unbelievers (in atheism) to repent or be in some cases forced to yield. The article mentions that some feel that religion at all, or belief in God, should be legally treated like smoking and parents should be prohibited by the state from subjecting their children to its harmful effects.
Disrespect towards those who see things differently, or violence towards them, seems to me a very dangerous way to go, that only pours gasoline on the fire. Freedom of religious diversity was one of the founding principles of the USA, after all.
So, without getting entangled in an endless debate over logical proofs of who is "right", is there something useful that can be said about this issue, from the perspective of health and public health? Definitely.
The first point is some ground rules. If people are going to get emotional or violent just from thinking about this subject, they should please stop reading now, or at least stop yelling, so the rest of us can hear what each other is saying.
I'll suggest some themes or approaches to this very important debate that may be more productive than most of the debate I've seen or wasted a decade or so pursuing. These are, in my mind, themes that both the scientific and skeptical community, and the religious moderate community could possibly agree on. Let's start there and build on strength.
First, we need a little perspective on where we are in understanding life around us.
Historically, the discovery of the "microscope" completely changed our understanding of the nature of life and human beings. It took centuries to adjust to the idea that we are not alone in our bodies, but are, in fact, hosts to millions of smaller living things that have varying degrees of cordiality to us. A few of those don't play nicely, and are called "pathogens" or "germs", and science tries to kill those off, but most of the rest get along with us just fine. Some, like mitochondria, have taken up permanent residence in every cell. Some, like the ones that live in our gut, are visitors that we need to digest food. It's spooky to be a "colony" organism.
A very large fraction of the US research budget is currently devoted to looking for "answers" to what ails us by peering down that microscope to the DNA within those cells, etc.
Actually, and relevant, if you look at a slice of living tissue through a microscope you'll see approximately nothing, because it is pretty transparent. You have to find something to stain it with first, some sort of dye, to see it at all. This is as important as the microscope itself.
You might think that Science is similarly equipped with a "macroscope", a tool that allows us to look upwards in the hierarchy of life, to see what's going on there. You'd be wrong.
It turns out, we don't have such a device. We have telescopes, but those look out at larger geographic space, not along the axis of the vertical hierarchy of life, the one that goes from who knows what to atoms to cells to people to ever larger aggregations of people like relationships and families and villages and communities and corporations and nations and cultures.
So, here's my point. It seems silly, or non-productive, to argue what the shape and nature is of the infinite limit version of life (ie, "God"), when we can't even make out what the shape and function is of the next few higher levels above us in any reliable and reproducible way. Couldn't we learn to crawl before we try to run?
So, my suggestion is that before we waste a lot of time and energy arguing about what is billions of levels above people, let's see if we can get any decent tools at all that look upwards at all, maybe just the next few levels. And let's learn how to "stain" it so we can see hidden structure.
Multilevel models have recently come into use, but they're really complicated and still leave out feedback. Most researchers don't know how to use them, the ones that do don't know how to persuade the others of their findings, and anything that involves loops is still left out of the model, which is most of life.
An "interaction" is by nature a bi-directional beast. Human interactions involve almost as much feed-forward, responding to what we think the other person is going to do in the future, as they do responding to the past. Causality gets totally messed up. Putting out garbage cans seems to cause the garbage trucks to arrive, based on the order things happen. It's hard to study.
Most of Science turned away from these fields with about the same bad taste that high school students have for "social studies" in general, but with more erudite arguments about these being somehow "soft sciences." The snooty implication was that these areas of life were not really worthy of study, or not important, or too complicated to study, or otherwise dismissed them and cleared them off the table so we could get down to real science, "hard" science, where things weren't so squishy and where causality stayed local where it could be measured.
Well, all those things we put off are coming back to haunt us now. Our lack of understanding of how societies and cultures work has certainly revealed itself in the USA's "nation building" efforts in the Middle East and Asia. Whatever else is going on there, it's clear that we have no solid body of knowledge that all scientists agree on that tells us how to build or rebuild a family or a town or a village or a community or a culture or a nation. Why don't we?
What do we have? Well, we have a huge number of books published on how to make a two-person relationship work. Judging from evidence, letting the "data speak", we don't know much about that yet either. We're surrounded by broken hearts, broken relationships, and broken homes.
So, that's strange, isn't it? What have we spent a trillion dollars on research for? Where's the beef?
We see this impact our bodies and health as well. Depression is rampant. Our medical and hospital system is oriented around a classical, reductionist, isolationist model where '"the patient" is the protoplasm blob that comes into the clinic, and the rest of the world that didn't come in has been treated as irrelevant to physiological health. But now we're realizing that is not true.
One of the strongest predictors of physical health or mortality is social connectedness. There are some sort of interactional things that happen that dramatically alter "our own" personal, physical bodies. Daniel Goleman's latest book, Social Intelligence, describes how when two people meet they, in some senses, take over control of each other's bodies with "mirror neurons." Spooky.
The evidence for such "psychosocial factors" impacting, or even determining "our health" is growing daily, and is very "robust", which is to say, that everywhere we look for it, we're finding it.
But, sadly, we don't even have the mathematics or methods to measure this yet, or to analyze it, or to write about it to other scientists. Scientists in fields like social epidemiology like Lisa Berkman or Ichiro Kawachi or Tom Glass are just barely started at figuring out how to incorporate "feedback" into these hierarchical models of humans-in-social-context. There a few books out, like Social Epidemiology by Berkman and Kawachi, which are collected papers, but they're expensive and academic.
The National Institutes of Health has an Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research that recognizes this hierarchy and seeks to understand it, but that's not been wildly popular or successful so far at "changing the paradigm." The latest research R21 RFA with grant funding to work on tools for the area is described below and is for a paltry $3 million.
The problem is that as soon as "feedback" comes in, almost all the standard statistical techniques we've used for the last 80 years become inapplicable. Those tools almost all rely on linear causal pathways, where the output doesn't feed back into the input. Study of such feedback effects has had 50 years since Jay Forrester at MIT laid out the field of system dynamics, and just now, this year, 2006, is the very first time that the term "system thinking" has made it into the Master of Public Health curriculum.
So, cut through all that. I started pondering God and ended up pondering my neighborhood.
I'm stating that there are huge discoveries being made every day now in public health about how the higher levels of the hierarchy of life that humans are in the middle of affects us. This field is in it's infancy, but starting to pick up steam.
I'm suggesting that development of this "macroscope" capacity, the ability to look upwards, at all, any distance, is what is happening, slowly, all around us. This is something I'd suggest that the religious folks, and the scientists, and the passionate New Atheists could and should support. Many of these "Brights" are techies and could help bring the power and tools of the web and advanced image and data processing and collaboration into the halls of public health, which currently desperately need such assistance.
I'm also suggesting that, instead of killing off each other for disagreements over what's on the very top of the pyramid of life, we should all agree to suspend violence while we all cooperate in efforts to get a good handle on the next few layers above humans.
This is where the rubber meets the road, where our behavior interacts with the behavior of others, where we get a lot of feedback and accountability for things we have done in the past, individually and collectively, often things we'd rather forget.
So, even a very basic look at systems thinking in a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline will reveal that complex active systems all have both feedback and "lags" in them, that is, the feedback often takes a while to get back to us. We can't even measure that well yet.
Senge's book is great in that it introduces the "Beer Problem", where rational people, behaving rationally, end up at each other's throats and screaming and blaming others for hostility when, in point of fact, it's just the larger system structure that we'd gotten wrong, and everyone was actually well intentioned.
First, before we kill off each other, please, can't we understand that issue better, and figure out how much of what we're blaming each other for is really, sigh, in the end, the lagged reflections and downstream impacts of our very own actions?
Then, when we have those tools in hand, and know how to look upwards, let's come back and revisit this question of what is way, way up from us.
Till then, it seems, we have our work cut out for us, and it would be productive immediately and help our personal, community, and public health to learn how to understand psychosocial factors and build our "macroscope."
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reference:
Recently, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online.
The Request for Applications includes several explicit statements
encouraging submissions grounded in various forms of simulation
modeling, including SD (albeit misspelled in the announcement). The
long list of examples of research sought includes the follow excerpts...
* Methodologies and/or technologies that improve or develop new
approaches to nonlinear analysis e.g., recurrence quantification
analysis, fractal analyses, systems dynamic modeling, agent-based
modeling and other simulation techniques.
photo credit: "Spiral" by george_morgan
technorati tags:theology, science, religion, systems, systemsthinking, publichealth, sociology, psychology, atheism, beliefs, rootsofviolence
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