Christians, Jews, and Moslems kiss and make up

Two news items this week show that the time is right for figuring out why three branches of the same Abrahamic tree of faith are at each other's throats so much, and fixing that.

Scholars from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam got together and realized there was way more in common than in dispute between these faiths. They moved on to looking again at exactly why each one feels it has to be the "only" faith.

Here's the first item:

Call for Muslim-Christian Unity 'Very Encouraging', Says Vatican Interfaith Head

A top Vatican official in charge of relations with Islam said a recent letter from Muslim scholars to Pope Benedict XVI and other global Christian leaders is “very interesting” and “very encouraging.”

Sun, Oct. 14, 2007 Posted: 10:40:43 AM EST

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A top Vatican official in charge of relations with Islam said a recent letter from Muslim scholars to Pope Benedict XVI and other global Christian leaders is “very interesting” and “very encouraging.”

"I would say that this represents a very encouraging sign because it shows that good will and dialogue are capable of overcoming prejudices," Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said Friday, according to The Associated Press.

The letter, entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” calls for peace and understanding between Islam and Christianity, claiming that if the two communities are not at peace “the world cannot be at peace.”

“Our common future is at stake,” it added. “The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.”

The document has been hailed by many as unprecedented and historic as it includes the signatures of 138 Muslim clerics, scholars and intellectuals from all branches of Islam – Sunni and Shia, Salafi and Sufi, liberal and conservative. Among the signatories were no fewer than 19 current and former grand ayatollahs and grand muftis, noted Newsweek magazine.


Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, here's the second item"

From the Los Angeles Times

Scholars try to reconcile 'problematic' religious texts

Christian, Jewish and Muslim experts met this week to add context to passages that have been perceived as hostile toward other faiths.

By K. Connie Kang
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 20, 2007 (excerpts):

Speaking with mutual respect and sensitivity, prominent Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars and clergy from around the country met in Los Angeles this week to "wrestle" with what one rabbi described as the "dark side" of the three faith traditions.

Experts cited "problematic" passages from the Hebrew Scripture, the New Testament and the Koran that assert the superiority of one belief system over others.

Firestone said that all monotheistic traditions are confronted with the problem of chosen-ness and that "we all need to work through this absolutely basic notion in each of our religious systems."

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, which co-sponsored the event with Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., said all people of faith need to "take ownership of their most difficult texts, wrestle with them -- not run away from them -- but confront them, where appropriate, set them in their proper historical context.

"After wrestling, I hope people can understand these texts in the appropriate contexts and realize that not all of them, but many of them, are bound by conditions of social milieu, of culture, of historical context."

In some instances, he continued, people of faith need to say to themselves, "This is part of my sacred tradition, but I reject it. I find this text offensive. It goes against my own morality, and it goes against what I believe God expects of me in the world today."

That calls for a great deal of theological introspection, education and courage, he said.

Called "Troubling Tradition: Wrestling With Problem Passages," the program at the Luxe Hotel in Bel-Air on Monday and Tuesday was the second in a series of four international conferences initiated by the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of Sacred Heart University.

"We want to foster serious theological and moral thinking about those aspects of our traditions . . . that are intolerant and delegitimizes the other and have been used by extremists to foster violence and hatred," said Rabbi Eugene Korn, executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding. "It's absolutely critical now because of the increase in religious violence and extreme hostility."

The first conference was held last year in Connecticut. There will be conferences in Germany in 2008 and Jerusalem in 2009. The papers presented at the conferences will be published as a book and posted on the Internet.

Speakers at the Los Angeles conference also included Rabbi Elliott Dorff, rector and professor of philosophy at American Jewish University, and Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Conservative Christian Ann Coulter's recent comment about Jews needing to be "perfected" by converting to Christianity was mentioned only in passing.

"Panelists and presenters chose not to dignify her remarks with a response," Diamond said.

Jerry D. Campbell, president of the Claremont School of Theology, summed up the event:

"God is challenging us to take the idea of troubling texts to the next level, to begin a new conversation across faiths and throughout the world, with the goal of realizing God's own hope that all God's creation may learn to live harmoniously together."

A question of baseline

One possible scientific working hypothesis about religion is that it's just remarkable how many people are delusional. Another is that there is something under all that smoke, regardless how poorly it has been resolved and how artfully it has been decorated.

Given my understanding of both humans and feedback loops and psychology, I can see the power of shared myths to persist and feed and grow, as effectively a living thing. On the other hand, given what I've learned about the computational power of massive parallel "connnectionist" architectures, and neural networks and human vision models and computer vision models, I tend to think that there is indeed a very real potential for emergent power in crowds to detect signals that any individual would miss.

A species as a living thing may perceive a different world, dimly but correctly, that is not accessible to individuals in the species -- just as your brain perceives a world that would not make any sense to an individual neuron. If you and your neuron could meet for coffee, there's not much you could talk about in common, except for things like the problems with control, and how hard it is to get good help these days. Taxes, defense policy, immigration, college applications are simply not sensible on the scale of one neuron.

Under a slight extension of the general Cosmological Principle ("there is nothing special about where we are, when we are, or what scale we are") we have to assume that this principle of "insensible larger concerns" is true as well for people-level thingies (us.) That is, there may be a lot going on that not only do we not know about, but that, given our size, we will never know about. In fact, if we use some sort of iterative reasoning, and apply this Cosomological principle yet again, there must also be some things that even earth-scale species, regardless how electronically wired in the future, will never be able to comprehend. And so on, who knows how far upwards. Maybe in this universe even Galactic scale (10 to the tenth stars) thingies will have galactic-cluster events that they will never be able to comprehend.

So far, I think that is pretty solid scientific reasoning. In short it is a more reasonable hypothesis that we humans are permanently shut out of certain knowledge, due to our finite size, than that we're almost gods. Yes, we can wire up the blogosphere and let the huge connectionist engine start cranking and discovering Things that it can respond to, but it can never really tell us fully what those Things are, any more than we can explain a 1040 tax form to a neuron. It's a simple bandwidth limit. None of us have 500 years to listen to the details, for starters, so anything that takes over 500 years to explain is out. It's a very strong assertion to say that that set is empty, and a much weaker assertion to say that there may be stuff in that set.

These days, most of us cannot and will never grasp things that take more than 5 years to explain, except in very narrow tertiary specialty areas. In business and politics, sometimes it seems that 15 minutes is the cut-off, and any concept that takes over 15 minutes to explain is simply in the "insensible" or "incomprehensible" set. I think that political advertising assumes that anything that takes over 30 seconds to explain the the public might as well not even be attempted.

This cut-off frequency to the full spectrum of knowledge in turn must result, by signal theory, in some rather major distortions in what it is that we do think we see with what limited capacity we do have. A classic result in radio-astronomy for example was Ron Bracewell's realization, around 1926 or so I think, that the best details that could be resolved, even with infinite observations and averaging out the noise, was limited buy a resolution of lamda over D, where lamba is the wavelength being monitored and D is the diameter of the radio telescope "dish" or "grid" or "lens" or "mirror" being used. Similarly for eyeballs - if you want eyes like a hawk, you need a wide-diameter pupil, and humans just can't go there with out tiny eyeballs.

So, the question comes then, are the "details" important or negligible? This is worth stopping to ponder. I spent 5 years at Parke-Davis pharmaceutical R&D division generating cross-sectional images of blood-vessels to assist in research on coronary disease. With microscopes as with people, we had a choice of picking a high-power lens, and seeing details down to the individual cells staining structure, or a low-power survey lens, and seeing the big picture, but we couldn't do both. It turned out that was a critical problem and gave wrong answers. We needed both the details and the big picture to grasp what was going on and how and why. So I developed techniques to take many high-resolution images and assemble them into a high field-of-view montage, and then we finally had something the computer could analyze and get meaningful results that corresponded to biological truth.

The image at the top of this post is one such montage I made in 1995. (repeated here).

There are some other examples of that sort of work on my quantitative biomedical imaging website, at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~schuette.

So, at least in that one case, yes, the details mattered. Hmm. OK, then in at least some cases, the details matter and change the answer. Do we know anything at all about which cases that might be? Well, it will certainly include cases where the details add up to more than the low-resolution/high-field of view facts. This could easily include feedback loops, where those tiny details ( like,say, a persistent 5%/year drop in value of the US dollar ) add up or compound over the span in question, and end up dominating the computation of the final value in your dollar-denominated bank account.

The distortion caused by cutting-off a portion of the spectrum is also not negligible. You can't just chop off a signal and get the middle part you hoped for, but instead you get large scale distortion that is mathematically the Fourier transform of your chopping function.

Here's an example:

Skipping the math, if you try to "look at" a point source, like a star, through a hole in a piece of metal, say, even if the point source "fits" in the hole, what you see will be distorted as shown on the bottom. You'll "see" a sort of diffuse bell-curved shape source in the middle, surrounded by a dark ring, then a bright ring, and another dark ring, and yet another dimmer bright ring, etc.

You cannot get around this, known in the optical domain as "diffraction". It's a law of physics and signals. If you look up diffraction in Wikipedia, you'll see another example of what you see looking through a square hole:

OK, wow. So the size and shape of the hole or "aperture" through which you are trying to look can dramatically change what you "see" or directly perceive or detect with film or an imager or a radio signal detector.

Now, that's not a fatal problem if you know your distortion pattern, because you can "back it out of the equation" and computationally figure out what shape actual signal must have been there to generate the signal you "measured".

That works for optical and radio astronomy and optics in general. For microscopes this is the "psf" or "point-spread function." You can use the magic of Fourier Transforms to undo the distortion and get a clean image of what you'd see without it, mostly.

But here's our problem as a society. To me, the same effect applies to looking at the world through a finite aperture, or gap, defined by a limited set of "scales" and time-frames we are going to observe. So as humans, we are making observations on smaller and smaller scales of time, and on magnitude scales that tend to be about the same size as us, whoever "us" is (person, corporation, nation, culture.)

But by blocking out larger scale information (that we might call "context") and smaller-scale information (that we might call "negligible details") we are then bound, by the laws of physics, to be directly perceiving a distorted signal. The problem is, we don't realize we need to undistort it before paying attention to what it says.

How distorted will it be? Well, look at the point source viewed through the square hole. Pretty distorted.

The same thing is true on one-sided "holes", or simply blocking out everything to the "Right" of a point source with a sheet of metal, we'll still get distortion near the edge.

Hmm. So, if we don't realize we're cutting off all signals above a certain scale (slowly varying, long-wavelength) and below a certain scale (rapidly varying "details" of very short wavelength), we won't realize that we cannot help but see a distorted picture of the real world out there - the one we'd see without such distortion.

That brings me full cycle back to pondering what sort of "receiver characteristics" a massive array of people-shaped sensors over 1000 years might have. We can say something, with no further details, about what kinds of signals and patterns and frequencies it would be able, in theory, to "pick up" or detect, what it would be blind to, and what sort of distortions it would necessarily have.

If that social-shaped antenna "sees" something it resolves into a pattern it calls "God" or some of the other aspects of "religion", we need to reflect carefully on simply dismissing that data point as "noise". It is not at all obvious that it is receiver noise, and it is the worst abuse of science to discard a data point simply because we don't like it, or because it doesn't fit our preconceived notion of how things are and what "should" be there.

Besides, we don't have much opportunity to do such long-baseline (1000 year long) observations ourselves, so we should treasure the few we do have.

We know a few things with a fair amount of certainty. We know lamda over D will be a limit on resolution of details, unless it is computationally broken using a technique of hyper-resolution.
That means, in lay terms, that the wider the baseline diameter, the more we can potentially "see". The more diverse the observing group is, the wider it is spread out along any dimension, the better the group can triangulate in on something and resolve how far away it is from us. A very wide baseline will let us sort out foreground from background. A totally uniform set of sensors will have zero resolution and be totally blind to telling foreground from background. Diversity matters, in a purely information-capture sense.

The question for Science, with respect to Religion, then, it seems to me, is not to be obsessed with the persecution of Gallileo or Iowa's decisions about evolution, but to ask what this irreplaceable observational unit in our heritage may have seen that we, here, now, looking over a few year window, could never possibly see.

Even lousy sensors, such as the cells in our retina, can give you a good picture of the world if you process the signal correctly, which is what much of our brain is hardwired to do. There is value in those low-grade signals, if processed cleverly and assembled into a big picture.

It's not a question of "right" versus "wrong". It's a question of baseline.

There is no scientific justification for discarding one of our longest-baseline observations, regardless how "bright" or "technical" the individual sensors in that array were compared to us. We are stuck in the narrow "now", and they have the advantage of a several thousand year baseline. Nothing we can do with gigahertz processors and PhD's can overcome that physical law on signal processing theory. A crowd may see things our most brilliant scientist missed.

Wade

One Common Faith

The booklet title One Common Faith , prepared under the supervision of the Baha'i central administrative body (The Universal House of Justice, 2005) has been recommended for group study. The starting point is this:

Ancient sectarian conflicts ... have re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before... A world... is warned that it is in the grip of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable religious antipathies. (page 7)

I want to bring some concepts from science to the discussion, and show how they fit with the theological and sociological arguments that are in the booklet. In some ways, this is a translation, as best I can, at first pass, of the document into "scientific" terms. It will be imperfect and I'm hoping that, with comments from you, dear reader, it can be improved. Hopefully, the discussion will not cause any additional hostility. ("First of all, do no harm!")

To that end, let me state that I'm going to look at some apparently depressing facts, but the end of the story will be optimistic, hopeful, and action oriented. My take on life is that, despite all the gloom and doom, some aspects of the global community have never been better, and, with the use of the web and instant global communications, we have an opportunity to improve the process that no generation in history has ever had before. This by itself is astounding, and means the past cannot be used to predict the future.

Part of the reason for the resurgence of religion is described in the booklet as the "bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself" -- the failure of various efforts whether secular, humanitarian,
social and economic development, modernization, globalization to make good on their promise to improve life for most of us. The promise of "freedom from want [and] fulfilment for the human spirit" has not been met.

I'd note that not only is the gap growing between rich and poor, as has been well document elsewhere, but even within the USA, as I described yesterday, the "economic miracle" seems to be sinking. Gasoline hit $3.59 a gallon in my town yesterday. Housing foreclosures are at record levels. Layoffs abound. Personal savings has gone negative and hit a rate not seen since 1933 in the "Great Depression". Obesity, depression, diabetes, asthma are rising rapidly. And so on while people seem, individually and collectively, numbed into a type of helpless-hopeless passive despair, as I described in "A Patient Dies in Los Angeles" , occasionally breaking out into extreme violence, and resurgences of anger, blame, hate crimes, and racism, individually and collectively. Why isn't this economic model working?


The answer given in One Common Faith, to paraphrase, is that we have "thrown out the baby with the bathwater." Observing the abuses and downside of religious thinking and warfare, our society attempted to break free of those problems by discarding religion and God and adopting a "scientific" and materialistic model where "competition" and "free-markets", it was argued, will produce the best possible social outcomes. Exactly how and why that was supposed to work was vaguely described as "The invisible hand of Adam Smith" or some version of "survival of the fittest", although I can't recall ever seeing a simulation model showing that individual unbridled local self-interest produced the maximum benefit for all and a stable society. (If you know of one, please comment.) And, regardless what any model might show, the actual outcome was described yesterday, and looks more like economic and social ruin than "The Great Society."

On page 12 it is argued that "global integration" has only perpetuated and intensified gross inequities, resulting in

a questioning of all established authority, no longer merely that of religion and morality, but also of government, academia, commerce, the media, and, increasingly, scientific opinion. (p12)

and

Loss of faith in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human experience reinforce one another int he longing they inspire for understanding about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial attachments are surrendered; one unthinkable demands are accepted. (para 16)

Despite the tremendous accomplishments of religiously inspired actions in the past, the question is raised as to why people are not turning to that spiritual literature for guidance today - or, if they are turning to it, not finding relevant guidance.

The problem is, of course, twofold. The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order. Although the received truths of the great faiths remain valid the daily experience of the individual in the twenty-first century is unimaginably removed from the one that he or she would have known in any of those ages when this guidance was revealed. ... In large part therefore, loss of faith in traditional religion has been an inevitable consequence of failure to discover in it the guidance required to live with modernity successfully and with assurance.

A second barrier to a re-emergence of inherited systems of belief as the answer to humanities spiritual yearnings is the effects already mentioned of global integration. Throughout the planet, people raised in a given religious frame of reference find themselves abruptly thrown in close association with others whose beliefs and practices appear at first glance irreconciably different from their own. ...

Each one of what the world regards as independent religions is set in the mould created by its authoritative scripture and its history. As it cannot refashion its system of belief in a manner to derive legitimacy from the authoritative words of its Founder, it likewise cannot adequately answer the multitude of questions posed by social and intellectual evolution. Distressing as this may appear to many, it is no more than an inherent feature of the evolutionary process. ...

The dilemma is both artificial and self-inflicted.
(para 21 and 22)

There are several familiar threads in this section I'd like to


highlight, and bring the experiences of some other fields to bear on. The concepts I'd focus on are these:

1. The idea that "truth" depends on context.
2. The idea that context changes over time.
3. The question of how what should change over time so as to preserve "truth".
4. The question of sliding the respective "truths" of different religious founders across time and comparing them to see how much they agree, after correcting for the distortions produced by context shifts.

I focus on those because those are actually the core issues that are pondered and completely solved in the entirely "scientific" area of "General Relativity" - which is the study, basically, of how to make measurements and think and operate in a world in which context (space-time) and content (matter and energy) interact bidirectionally and affect each other, producing many "fictitious forces" that are artifacts of the accidental details of each careful observer's reference frame in which they are inextricably and invisibly embedded. (See my earlier post on Context versus Content, Silos and the Electronic Health Record. )

In other words, I'm saying that the concepts necessary to understand what is happening to religious truth over time have already been developed in science, but never been brought to bear on the problem in theology.

This is not surprising, because the concepts have an aura of "complexity" that "only Einstein" would be able to understand, because they are so "alien and unfamiliar".

Well, I've scouted out that territory, taken a good, solid graduate-level course in General Relativity, solved those equations, and can report back that this material is not at all that scary if you hide the math in the calculator and just use the results.

Furthermore, it is not at all "alien." In fact, we are born being comfortable with these ideas -- such as the fact that, in general, the volume of a liquid depends on its shape -- and then, as Piaget showed, we have these beaten out of us by "education" and finally "learn" that volume doesn't depend on shape, and that the tall, skinny glass of juice has the same amount as the short, wide glass it was just poured from. The problem is that, THEN, when these students reach grad school, trying to teach them that volume does, in fact, in general, depend on shape except on small, cold, rocky places like the Earth, they find the idea that was native and "came with the unit" to now be "unthinkable."

I have to wrap this up for the day and will continue working my way through "One Common Faith" in the next few days, tying it into the related scientific concepts that help understand it.

Let me close by at least pointing out that the idea that things change shape as they are slid through space or time is captured in the concept from General Relativity (or Hilbert Space mathematics) called "parallel displacement" or "vector transplantation."

In "curved" spaces, which are common on cosmological scales, the way things change as you slide them across space and time can be exactly computed, and therefore it can be "backed out" of the equations and corrected for. Seemingly inconsistent observations, such as two observers each seeing the other's clock run more slowly than their own" can be completely explained, predicted, and corrected for, revealing the beauty of an underlying, absolute reality, the perception of which was distorted by each observer's invisibly distorted reference frame,
and the attempt to measure straight lines with curved rulers.

Fascinatingly, the key concept comes down to what paths light travels, or "geodesics", as light's path pretty much defines "straight." That should be of particular interest to Baha'is, as the word itself means "light of God."

What is really fascinating is to imagine taking all the great religious prophets of time, assuming that they are all saying the same thing (plus noise in the reporting), and computing whether a single consistent curvature of space-time could be applied to bring them all into perfect alignment. Or, if not perfectly aligned, the "transported versions" of them could be tweaked slightly to fit the shared truth great grand estimate, then the process reversed and the "tweaks" transported back to the original context, and assessed to see if those would in fact be legitimate and acceptable small changes in concept of the source religious doctrine or not.

I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but the very fact that science does say that such a thing is conceptually possible is really important to grasp - that there are techniques to figure out what properties transport over time as "constants" and which ones transport over time as "invariants" and which as "covariants" and what properties will be preserved regardless and which ones will appear to change, due to the change in context.

If we don't even use that basic level of mathematics to compare two religions it's hard to know how we expect to tell whether, at the core, they agree with each other or not. We will be overwhelmed with accidental changes due to reference frame changes that look like they matter, but that, in the final analysis, add up to exactly zero difference.

It's time to cross-breed these scientific and religious issues. Quoting from my old textbook,
Introduction to General Relativity (Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965), on page 16,

In order to make these general and rather abstract considerations more specific, we shall have to develop an elegant notation and proper mathematical tools which are provided by the theory of tensor analysis. The basic problem of tensor analysis is the determination of those constructs and concepts which are independent of the accidental choice of the coordinate system employed.

This, in my mind, is exactly the same problem that is involved in showing that all the world's major religions have, at their core, exactly the same constructs and concepts, underneath the apparent differences due to the "accidental choice" of reference frame in which those constructs had to be expressed at that time and place by the religion's Founder.

Science and Religion are on the same quest, trying to look through the surface complexity and noise, and see the constant Beauty behind and under it all. Science is starting at local details and working upwards, Religion is working at the global scale and working downwards, and, when they meet in the middle, if we've done our sums correctly, the two large pieces should mesh perfectly and the larger picture be revealed.

How neat is that!

Tomorrow (I hope) I'll expand on the phrase quoted above "The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order" and explore what the current evidence in public health and social epidiology teach us about changing concepts of the nature of "an individual" and why we need a larger concept to explain the very solid biomedical data from the majority of studies that show that "connectivity" of an individual to society is the major predictor of biomedical outcomes - disease, poverty, death, heart-attacks, obesity, violence, suicide - you name it. This whole area of very robust and solid scientific data from public health forces us to change the way we think about what it means to be a "person" and "an individual" in "society."

See: The hierarchy of life
and Key Findings from Public Health
for more information on what the data actually show about how "separate" we are from each other.

Photos of the "same" Earth from various viewpoints and times are from NASA.