More on "What's the Point of Religion?"

Continuing my last post, on the New Scientist's question of "What's the Point of Religion?" I'm looking at reasons for "religion" that scientists in calm moment should be capable of understanding and accepting, in their own terms.

Probably the major point is that the social enterprise Science is not "complete." There are very large, very substantial portions of the universe which you cannot get to in finite time using the approach Science is taking, starting where we are now. Many of those portions we don't even know about, and some of them we can already see.

Furthermore, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" (or as I call it to make a point, the Scientific Method version 3.1) are, astoundingly, not even playing by their own rules and calibrating their equipment before using it -- a sin a junior scientist would get grief for. The resulting blind spot is huge, and in critical areas related to religion and social systems in general.

If scientists all admitted that the Scientific Method v3.1 (hereafter SM31) was a model, and, like all models, "wrong but sometimes useful", that would be OK - but when they implicitly assert that they have the universe covered and Religion can go home now, it becomes problematic.

I have no doubt that they don't "see anything" when they look for God, but I also don't see that they have ruled out "equipment failure" by demonstrating that they are capable of seeing far easier synthetic test case patterns with known answers.

Model-imposed blindness is widespread in all fields, including Science. Pulsars, the radio-frequency strobe lights in the sky, are the third brightest thing in that spectral range after the Sun. They were missed for years because they have low average energy but huge pulse energy, and all the equipment radio-astronomers used had electronics in place to average signal strength, because "everyone knew there as no signal there, just noise." They were found only because a female graduate assistant asked "What if we take these out?", didn't like the put-down she received, so she did -- for which discovery her male faculty adviser, who had discouraged her action, received an award. ( I was in that field at the time and heard all the details.)

Or, the "hole in the ozone" over Antarctica. That was missed for years because the satellite had been programmed to simply discard any low readings, because "everyone knew" that those would just be due to equipment malfunction.

Quantum mechanics was rejected as impossible in physics. Plate techtonics was rejected as impossible in Geology. Sure, now they are seen clearly, but before that point, they were invisible. As Thomas Kuhn noted, there is a huge resistance to a "paradigm shift" even among, or perhaps especially among, trained professionals.

Right now, the shift away from deterministic machine models of physics to chaos theory, non-linear math, distal causality, etc. is not widespread. The certainty and simplicity of the old theories create a huge reluctance to let go and move forward.

But to study social systems on a planetary scale will require moving forward. There is no way to "extrapolate" smaller scale or shorter-term mechanical or electronic systems to such large scales in space, time, and feedback complexity.

And, as astronomer Frank Drake pointed out to our astrophysics class one day in the late 1960's, every time a new window of the electromagnetic spectrum is opened up we see not only a new side of known phenomena, but we also see entirely unexpected and new phenomena that we never knew was there. This universe is dense with things going on that are not obvious.

Science can't even resolve fairly simple questions such as whether it is genes that evolve, and species are a byproduct -- or species that evolve, and genes are a byproduct. Are people just genes way of making other genes? Probably this evolutionary process occurs at multiple levels simultaneously, with bidirectional feedback loops. Most scientists don't like that idea because it's too complicated for them to follow or research. Right. So is a lot of life.

But understanding clearly how the hierarchical thing we call "Life on Earth" evolves, and what relationship higher level processes have to lower level processes is a rather central problem, I'd say. This is a very small scale, small-space, small-time model for a much larger scale hierarchy that extends upwards to ... well, we don't know where it goes. Religion says "God" and Scientists wince. But Science can't give us a reliable extrapolation either, because Science, today, can't even get its hands around what is going on on our own little plane and what principles govern evolution of planetary sized entities.

Science has exactly one data point, and all the data on that one are not in yet. That means, let's see, uh ... one minus one would be .. oh yes, ZERO. Science, then, is happily and confidently telling us that there is nothing going on at cosmic scales and time periods, on the basis of ZERO data points. Wow, that's powerful stuff -- or unreliable fluff, to use polite words.

Scientists are mostly involved in further extrapolatiting the fractal shaped knowledge-base deeper and deeper into secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and whatever comes next specialties. That's what they get paid to do. There is very little pressure, or reward, for spending time trying to put all the pieces back together again and see what they spell.

In fact, I can't imagine any PhD adviser recommending that his student consider looking at "the BIG PICTURE" and trying to say the first thing about it. That is not considered "Science" but something else, never very clear what. Narrow, narrower, narrower is the advice, the training, the research. I can't even think of what "scientific field" spends its time trying to figure out "what it all adds up to" if you reassemble all the pieces we have found.

So, that's the gap, the role, the place where religion comes in and says "THIS is what is it all about." (or 20 different "this" versions for 15 different religions.)

Science asserts confidently "there is no purpose to all this universe" based, again, on what? On a long experience with different kinds of universes, some with purpose, some without? Hardly. Do we know how this one will turn out? No, not yet. Again, we have zero data points to work with.

And, for that matter, exactly what "purpose-ometer" is used for making this judgment, and how was it calibrated? I'd really like to see that device and the test results. -- which is impossible since there is no such device.

For instance, please look at this "cake" in this hot oven and tell me for sure whether it is "being made" or simply "evolving according to natural chemical and thermodynamic principles."

Or let's see the algorithm or device or statistic that can differentiate between "coincidence" and "enemy action" with high accuracy. Or one that can tell "criminal intent" from simple incompetence with high reliability. We have no devices that can detect "purpose" on easy test cases, so why should we trust them on much larger and more complex cases? Why do scientists trust them is the puzzle to me.

Or, try this one. Do tobacco companies' Advertising cause people to smoke and die from tobacco-related medical conditions? On a small scale, viewed person by person, there is no "causality". Some people ignore ads. Etc. On a population scale, yes, of course, the billions of dollars spent on advertising have a deterministic effect, or it wouldn't keep on being spent. We have "causality" that is scale-dependent, that is not visible at short-range scales but is visible at large-range scales. This isn't news to Science.

Which is stronger - the strong force of Electromagnetic attraction or the weak force of gravity? Well, on the scale of this room, electrostatic charge can hold a balloon up on the wall despite gravity. On the scale of the galaxy, electromagnetic interactions have vanished, and gravity dominates evolution. We have no idea what even "weaker" forces their might be, so weak that we can't detect them yet, that, on the scale of billions of galaxies, might determine evolution.

Science has been great at the large-self-energy, low-interaction energy end of the spectrum, with rocks and billiard balls interacting. It has very little power, as currently constituted at the other end, where self-energy is reduced to vanishing and interaction energy dominates the scene, or a the limit point where there are no "objects" only pure "interactions" remaining.

The only place we know of so far that is near that end is apparently the center of our galaxy, and, well, we've never been there. We didn't even know there WAS a galaxy until a hundred years ago. On the scale of the universe we've sampled zero, or, if you stretch it, one incomplete case. By normal statistics, that makes the confidence limit infinite, meaning we know nothing.

I am not sold on the argument "That couldn't possibly happen because I personally can't think of how it would happen."

If Science wants to make arguments about social issues, fine, but first let's see your demonstrated capacity to manage anything whatsoever on the societal scale.

The problem is, there is no such capacity. Science so far has been going deeper and deeper into the microscope, not further and further up society's ladder. Or, any scientists left reading this, please let the rest of us know what the cure is for corruption in organizations and politics and how to stop it. Just run the numbers or something for us and show us your strength in that area to produce spectacular social outcomes - not to be confused with analysis or writing papers.
Or, heck, take something simpler and just fix the economies of the planet and prevent World War Three. When you have that one mastered, come back and let's talk about God again. But if you can't even get one single planet to work, what arrogance to consider yourselves authorities on the whole universe and how it works.

From what I can see of calibration of your equipment, you are very good at solving very small problems that cause large-scale things to decay or explode, but very bad at solving any scale thing that makes social-scale entities heal and grow, when actually attempted in the real world, not in some simulation or power-point presentation or paper.

This could be, and should be, a legitimate question for bright people of any persuasion --

what does it take to overcome the darkness and bring forth growth, peace, stability, and a thriving ecology?

What does it take to get us sufficiently organized that we can get off this little rock that's being pelted by asteroids and spread across the galaxy or farther? What does it take to roll back corruption and recover healthy growth?

Hint - the answer isn't "more technology", because technology, by itself, appears to be a centripetal force that threatens to rip our planet apart or demolish the ecosystem and biosphere. No number of cameras or high-tech walls will stop that enemy, because the enemy is already within the walls, already inside us.

We are our own worst enemy.

That's the problem we have to face, and address, and solve.

Or, frankly, we all die.

Unless you're on the verge of announcing a solution, I'd stop kicking religion in the shins and start asking what religion knows about human beings and social structures that might be helpful in this situation.

Maybe, together instead of at each other's throats, we could get somewhere.

Remembering our soldiers

Countries still send their youth to fight and die, or come home injured and changed, for causes too often "long ago forgotten."

In the US, memory seems to be very short, and even the returning soldiers from last year are themselves forgotten in corners of Walter Reed, or in our homeless shelters or in cardboard boxes on the streets.

While violence and war seem to be the last resort of those incapable of any higher form of civilization, those who go are often motivated by their understanding of what will protect and serve the rest of us, and deserve our respect. That applies as well to "enemy" soldiers and injured civilians as to our own.

This is one of the most obvious "multi-level" activities of mankind, where "the Nation" is off fighting one kind of war on one level, and armies are fighting a different war on a different level, and individuals and small teams are fighting a third kind of war on a different level.

And, the "causes" of war, or intervention points to stop wars and achieve "just and enduring peace" are similarly clouded by all the factors this weblog discusses, from feedback processes to distant causality and the aggregate impact of many "small things" that we don't realize add up to a dominant force.

I'm reading a book titled "Social Injustice and Public Health", (Oxford, 2006) by Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, which is the textbook for a course I'm taking later this summer. The editors, Levy and Sidel, previously edited two other books "War and Public Health" and "Terrorism and Public Health." Their main thesis is that social injustice underlies these problems -- war, terrorism, and public health -- and that those visible downstream outcomes cannot be resolved until the underlying problem of social justice is solved.

This is similar to the central thesis of the book Peace - More than an End to War, published by the Baha'i Publishing Trust in 1986. Quoting from the forward of that book,

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior - individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international - based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation,which, unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

The Baha'i teachings prescribe education for world citizenship, the fostering of effective communication, and the eradication of prejudice. The advocate social reconstruction and administration based on the principle of the oneness of mankind. Each of these behavioral changes supports the others...

While there are many misguided and less noble motivations for warfare, one of the most consistent one, on all sides of any such conflict, is the belief that sacrifice and even death are worth it in the struggle to make a world safe for our children to grow up free of terror, discrimination, disease, and oppression. I suspect no nation has ever gone to war without believing that they are champions of this effort and that they are fighting some version of evil personified. Dehumanization and demonization of "the enemy" is always rampant.

Yet, 50 years later, these people like us that we had perceived as demons are often our friends and allies, and now we've shifted to perceiving other groups as demons.

Surely, our linear minds think, there is someone out there to blame for what is going wrong, and it surely couldn't be ourselves.

One of the most important lessons of "systems thinking" is explained well using a class role-playing simulation of a massive instability in the production and distribution of the alcoholic beverage beer, in MIT Professor Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. Orders fluctuate wildly until companies start failing, but there is, it turns out, no one to blame. The system is to blame. The overall structure of the interactions is to blame, and, literally, every person in the system is behaving rationally and sensibly and no one intends the whole thing to go so wrong.

I can't think of anything more important for people who want to "stop war" or "end violence" to understand than that lesson. Often, no one is to blame, and everyone is to blame, for sustaining a structure that results, inevitably, inexorably, in us demonizing each other, and killing each other, instead of watching our children play soccer together.

The problem is that warfare has always been an inefficient and ineffective method of accomplishing the goal that everyone on all sides wants, ultimately, of a peaceful world with stable, thriving communities, economic prosperity, physical health, and an opportunity to move closer to nature and our particular view of God without being demonized ourselves for doing so.

We all want what our bodies and spirits are designed for and optimized for - social connectivity to each other. We want to belong, and to belong to something larger, and belong to something larger that has noble purpose and that may demand something of us but that sustains our best self in return. When that connectivity breaks down, as all the social epidemiology literature shows, when we become fragmented and disconnected, it is inevitably followed with depression, deteriorating personal physical health on many fronts, sometimes violence, and often death. We were never designed to try to face life alone, and it doesn't work well. Even the cells in our bodies, if removed from our bodies, commit suicide ("apoptosis"), apparently seeing no reason to go on.

This seems to be a deep, profound, and multi-level need, the need to belong, to reassemble all the loose parts and form a fabric, a community, a society, a culture.

One problem is that on different scales, individuals, groups, cultures, and sometimes entire nations and peoples are perceived as "not us" by other people, and efforts are made to marginalize, detach, suppress, or kill them outright - singly, in groups, or in massive genocidal wars. Needless to say, the attitude becomes mutual and self-reinforcing.

From the model I've been painting in the weblog, we may be able to view this in the framework of "regulatory feedback control systems" trying to do what they always do - namely, figure out where their own parts are, reassemble the parts, figure out what parts don't belong, get rid of those parts, and re-stabilize the whole thing in some kind of sustainable shape -- homeostasis in the case of humans, allostasis in the case of other beings or other levels of life, "system stability" in terms of large, complex computing systems and ecologies.

Now, that process is unstoppable and comes with the territory. You can't have Life without that process on every level, from sub-cellular components such as mitochondria to nations. There is nothing wrong with that design. It's a great design. It got us from a sea of hydrogen to the complex muli-leveled beings we are and the world we've built around ourselves and the natural world we've inherited, even if we seem bent on destroying as rapidly as possible.

What is killing us, and resulting in pain and violence at all levels, is not that process, but disorders of that process.

It is quite like our relationship with microscopic organisms known as bacteria. There are millions or billions of different kinds of bacteria, and for the vast majority of them we get along fine. In fact, there are some we literally could not live without, populating our intestines. Even some of the "diseases" that "we" get turn our to be the unintended side-effect of the bacteria themselves getting a disease from the much smaller viruses. We are not, or should not be, at war with bacteria. Coexistence dominates, and there are only a few places where it breaks down, and even those are malfunctions on the pathogen's end. It makes no sense for a pathogen to kill its host, and then have to go find another.

It is, on that scale, a poor business model.

Similarly, the cells of our bodies are not our enemies as humans. Occasionally, one goes crazy and starts ignoring the larger body and grows itself unboundedly, and we call that "cancer", but for the most part the health of our cells and the health of our bodies are fully compatible and, in fact, more than compatible, they are mutually supportive. It's the ultimate win-win solution.

It is, in my mind, a very similar process that we're fighting on a whole different scale with our economies and religions and armies.

Religions have disorders at the entire entity level because they can't resolve clearly what part of themselves is "them" and what part is "other", and we end up with "autoimmune disorders" where one part of the religious body turns on another part of the religious body and tries to destroy it. Sects develop and intersect warfare results. The body religious rips itself apart, to no one's benefit.

Immune systems are great, except when they go wrong. But it is not the concept of an immune system that should be discarded - it is the disorder of the immune system that needs to be repaired. You cannot make a living, sustainable anything without an immune system.

So, our attention then is turned, inevitably, onto how our social immune system makes the subtle but absolutely critical distinction between "me" and "not me", or "us" and "not us". Which thing out there should be preserve and healed, and which thing out there should be attacked and destroyed? This turns out to be a very hard question.

But, it turns out to be a very hard multi-level question, a scale-invariant question, a problem that is instanced on every single level of every living thing that ever was or will be.

In that is our hope, because, even though no one level tells us enough to "find the answer", the fact that all levels have this problem means we can pool data, trade notes, combine our insights from every level into a single master picture and then, I believe, we will be able to simply look at see what to do. It should be obvious, once we get the right viewpoint. It should be unambiguous, because it should be beautiful, simple, elegant, and have "white space" all around it. We should "resonate" with it, because it will be the answer our own body, our own psyche, our own family, our own community needs as well.

So, if we just accept the working hypothesis that "life" exists at every level, and then extend everything we know across levels, it should turn out we already know the answer. The "life sciences" should inform the "social sciences", and vice versa, because we all face the problem of supporting a multi-level mutually compatible immune system and the associated "identity" that the immune system is pledged to defend, at the price of death if necessary.

The expression of this identity at the social and national level can be perceived as "prejudice", when it attempts to divide one part of the human body from another and turns one part of our Body on another in the form of warfare or discrimination or suppression or exploitation.

Put most simply, that can't be good. It is an auto-immune disorder. It turns us on ourselves.

If our health is actually dependent on the health of the people around us and our connectivity to that, which it is, then it seems to follow that we want more of that, not less of it.

As Fisher and Shapiro note in their book Getting to Yes, after analyzing how to stop the Soviet Union and the USA from annihilating each other in a global thermonuclear war, there is a level upstream from the details of "position" where we can look at "interests" and realize that both sides, regardless how much they may hate each other at this moment, actually are made up of humans and actually have common interests - and if we can meet those human interests in some new way, the old "positions" that led to conflict can be released without struggle. The intractable simply dissolves.

This is the sort of thing that Kim Cameron experienced at the Rocky Flats nuclear waste-dump in the work I described yesterday - Making the Impossible Possible. It can work. It has worked. It does work. It will work.

We have a much larger problem than resolving the "Mideast crisis" facing us. The development of nuclear power is widely advertised as "the threat", but it is nothing compared to the threat of biological weapons, which almost any country can already develop. Unlike nukes, that at least mostly stay where they're used, aside from toxic plumes of fallout that will kill everything for the next 50,000 years -- the biological weapons can literally take on a "mind of their own" and decide that they will turn around and destroy their creators, then go on to destroy the rest of human life on the planet. That is not cool.

And, no missile defense shield or "Star Wars" project can stop such an onslaught, once it begins.
Such a thing can be launched, stupidly, by almost any two countries that decide the only way one of them can exist is to destroy the other.

The largest threat to the Homeland Security of the USA, in that light, has nothing to do with nukes or an "axis of evil", but has everything to do with any two countries or cultures or sects of a religion that get it into their heads that they should attack each other with bioweapons, which then spiral out of control around the globe.

There is only one defense for that threat to our lives and our children's lives and the entire future of the human race - and that is to tackle the disease and disorder of our collective immune system that keeps causing "some of us" to abruptly perceive "others of us" as mortal enemies that must be attacked to keep the whole body healthy and operational and to restore "homeostasis" on a larger scale.

As I say, I think we know a lot about regulatory control feedback systems, and we have an unimaginably huge computing capacity on the planet that is mostly used for video games and unused 2/3 of every day while we work or sleep. We have a global communications system with wearable camera-phones and wireless internet. Never before in history has any civilization had such powerful tools to use to tackle any social threat.

The threat is that our collective immune system, on a planetary scale, has not yet been stabilized and keeps mis-identifying parts of our own Body as "enemies" who must die.

It's an issue of who "we" are, at the core, and finding common ground with every other human on the planet -- which shouldn't be too hard in the space age, because we're all standing on the same little ball floating in a very hostile very large space out there.

Through the matter of how our individual and population healths are intertwined on a physiological and psychological and spiritual level, there is no "them" that is not, ultimately,
also "us." "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is redundant, because our neighbor turns out to be another side of ourself.

I recall the day our infant daughter Kelly saw something interesting waving in front of her face and reached out and bit down on it, as infants tend to do. The something was her own large toe.
It took about 2 seconds for this realization to work its way through the system and the shock and horror and pain to "click" and get her to stop biting her own self. Once the issue was "realized" there wasn't a problem in getting her to "disengage."

On a planetary scale we are not just "one people" but also one "meta-organism" with a life on its own level that is higher than our own, and that we share. We have a society and civilization and we have values and "epigenetic" information that was hard won that we want to pass on to our children's children.

It's time to tackle the job of healing that meta-organism's immune system, which will be reflected in the removal of "prejudice" of all types and the partitioning of the world into little subsections that think each other is some kind of enemy agent.

It's not that we shouldn't be fighting a war against bad things and evil, but that the bad thing we need to fight has to be "prejudice" and narrow-minded, short-sighted, selfishness that threatens to kill us all downstream of its own bloody in-fighting.

I think the framework I've laid out, mostly built on Baha'i and Public Health's best teachings, may be a way to approach that problem with new eyes, new tools, and new hope.

If so, maybe all the wars everyone has fought will be finally "worth it" and we can stop the rest of the wars forever, and actually heal this disorder instead of just living with it and dying from it.

Some people have found it strange that I spend a lot of time on a "public health" weblog talking about military leadership and US Army Doctrine. I don't see these as incompatible, and I want to address that question. The US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100) seems to me a marvelous work, even if it now superseded by FM6-22. The description of the doctrine is of a fighting force with tremendous focus on integrity, character, humility, strength, and being a learning organization that learns from every mistake and is agile and not hung up on outdated concepts or models of the battlefield, but can quickly process new information and develop a new model of what's going on. What is not to like there? If there are problems they are from failure to live up to that standard, not from the standard.

Here's a few excerpts from that manual:

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.

1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you speak.

1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless there was a good reason...

1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it must be developed over time.

1-15: People who are trained this way will accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.

1-23: you demonstrate your character through your behavior.

1-56: Effective leaders strive to create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their subordinates to seize the initiative and act.

1-74: The ultimate end of war, at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.

4-9: Be aware of barriers to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still talking.

4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes to mind.

4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all the time, even when no one is watching.

Such a group is not "the enemy." These aren't the words of people with an objective of hatred and destruction. These aren't the techniques of evil.

The people aren't the problem. The army is not the problem. Individual decisions are not the problem. The problem traces back, up stream, to our collective human immune system. Like Peter Senge's example, even when everyone does the right thing with the right intentions, this sucker breaks down. OK, fine, we've identified the issue, and some tools.

We owe it to everyone who fought to get us this far, preserving the values they understood our future depends on, to complete the job, repair the planet, and restore a vital peace that finally works correctly and doesn't keep veering the car off the road into the trees.

And we owe it to our veterans not to leave them homeless and abandoned. The weapons may have changed, but in a larger sense, we still need to "complete the mission" and protect our future. It's not "their war" and it's already "over here."

It is immoral and twisted to send our children to fight and die to protect some set of values that we are all not involved in protecting through our own daily lives. If these values are not a big deal, then bring the army home. If they are a big deal, why aren't the rest of us working on all the other fronts possible to resolve the conflict and all future conflicts?

"Memorial Day" 2007