Heaven and Stephen Hawking

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/17/heaven-is-a-fairy-story-scientist-stephen-hawking-says/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

I haven’t read a single book by Stephen Hawking and one might say I’m horrible for laughing at various jokes at his expense on Family Guy, but I remember when he posited a year ago in The Grand Design that we didn’t need God to explain the beginning of this universe, but instead can refer back to the most basic force of gravity. I faintly recall the explanation being something to the effect that gravity initiated the Big Bang itself because of the nature of quantum singularities, etc. I’ve never been one to be able to focus much on mathematics or science, but I can align with Hawking’s naturalistic approach to cosmology. I can respect people’s right to believe that God intervened in the Big Bang in some way or started the processes or abiogenesis or biological evolution, but Stephen Hawking’s declaration is a more explicit rejection of these sorts of partnerships on an intellectual level of religious beliefs and scientific theoretical models. For people to believe these things is their liberty, but to say that it even makes philosophical or scientific sense seems to miss the point that God and heaven by association are not scientific, they are experiential and psychological. People may believe they experience God or have gone to heaven/hell and returned, and I cannot contest their interpretation by personal experience, but one can observe brain chemistry and neurology to see that there are quite impressive processes going on that can conceivably generate these experiences, particularly NDEs (Near Death Experiences). Hawking himself actually said a bit before his famous statement thrown around these days; “heaven…is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark,” that the brain is likened to a computer that will cease to function when its parts break down. Many people in my own discipline may recoil in disbelief that someone could believe this, feeling that the human mind cannot be compared to something created by humans in a similar way people think humans cannot be compared to God in terms of ethical judgments. But when you start thinking about the complexities of a computer from a basic understanding of its parts and functions as they interact, the human mind is not a far cry from being just as awe inspiring without involving “God,”

When we don’t know everything about something, we’re motivated all the more by our wonder and amazement in our ignorance to remedy that problem by learning as much as we can. Hawking’s claim doesn’t reduce our amazement at the world around us, or even our own minds and the complexity of memory, cognition, emotions and the like; in fact it can make someone tear up at the prospect that we might begin to understand it more. And there’s no arrogance in that pursuit of knowledge any more than any pursuit of new information is somehow trying to take on the position of “God” or asserting oneself as the greatest human being who ever existed. People read way too much into science and come with varying degrees of willful ignorance or outright idiocy about what a scientist pursues. It is not absolute power or knowledge, but simply more and more comprehensive knowledge that we can acquire and use to structure the universe in some way, however limited it might be in reality or history as a whole.

There are probably also those who accuse the Cambridge professor of being afraid of death and lashing out at everyone who believes in heaven with his hostile statement that everyone who believes in the afterlife is a frightened child who doesn’t know any better. But Hawking has been in a state of potential death for almost 50 years since he was given 3 years to live at 21. He himself says he’s not afraid of death, though he implies he’s accepted it. But like any person on the verge of death in any form, he says we should make the most of the life we have, which I can wholeheartedly agree with. For people to take potshots at a man crippled by a disease that for all knowledge we have of it, should have killed him around when he was my age, is as shameful as criticizing Michael Fox for having Parkinson’s, though again, I’m guilty of laughing at Family Guy’s jokes about him. Not to mention the argument that an atheist doesn’t believe in the afterlife because they’re afraid of death is no more logical than saying theists believe in the afterlife because they’re afraid of death. Any person willing to be a martyr and go to the afterlife is clearly not afraid of death so much as they’re attached to the concept of heaven. I suppose when you invert the analysis that theists could be said to be attached to and clinging to life as they do their own existence one can make a more reasonable claim that they’re in some way afraid of death and use heaven as a buffer to suppress that fear or otherwise remove its threat. But if atheists are truly afraid of death, wouldn’t they do something similar to theists in using technology instead of beliefs in heaven to extend their lives to near immortality, such as through nanomachines or advanced medical treatments? But Stephen Hawking is not in any way unwilling to die when his disease completely destroys his motor nerve functions and stop his brain, thereby stopping his heart as well. In fact, one might say Stephen Hawking is a representative of that tendency in science to be very willing to accept your death and annihilation on some level, similar to Christopher Hitchens, still suffering from throat cancer. Theists don’t seem to be willing to believe that animals have souls because of some false sense of entitlement, as if God only gave them souls.

It’s when you recoil at the thought of death being the final end to a person’s life, only survived by memories, that you seem to be less appreciative of life, since you believe that people will get justice in heaven or hell, in an almost Hindu karmic sense that God will reward good and punish bad in an afterlife. If you believe that when people die they are gone, you can truly mourn their death in some sense. If you merely bewail that they aren’t with you now but will be with you in the future, it’s a pitiable sort of funeral, since you don’t really believe there’s anything to be sad about except that they are no longer physical. But then, the notion of heaven as spiritual seems to go over people’s heads and they think heaven will be as physical as it is now, just improved on some level. Christian metaphysics seem to suggest that the spiritual body of heaven might be better understood as a perfected body, but then that seems to just go along with the fear of death in general. I don’t see why you must believe you go on in order to make yourself feel less affected by someone’s physical death. If you really want to appreciate people’s lives and memorialize their deaths, saying they are gone forever seems the best way to do it, as terrible as it might sound at first. But then, emptiness from a Buddhist perspective has a similar misconception I hope to confront eventually when I run out of stories like this. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Attempts At Reconciling Creation(ism) and Evolution

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/10/my-take-jesus-would-believe-in-evolution-and-so-should-you/

I’ve never been much for blogging on the relationship between religion and science, mostly because I’m more interested in the topics of belief and nonbelief and the interaction between the faithful and faithless, but that’s more a future book topic than my wider range of blog topics. I’ve decided to broaden my horizons to an article whose subject I dismissed at first glance, but rethought it and am now trying to cover a wider range of topics, including some that really stand out from my usual fare, such as my recent piece on the varying Catholic perspective on IVF.

I’ve always been aware of attempts to bring peace to a commonly embittered relationship of the natural sciences on the stricter end of evidential standards and monotheistic religions on the other end. There are atheists that are creationists in some sense, such as the Raelians, who believe we were genetically engineered by an advanced race of aliens, from what I recall, but for the most part, creationists and intelligent design advocates are most commonly believers in “God” as the so called “creator”, whatever that might mean. There are two out of three major scientific theories related to physics and biology Christians are more commonly opposed to: Big Bang and abiogenesis. The first is an answer to the philosophical quandary of why something came from nothing that Christians find unacceptable because it doesn’t involve their creator. The second tries to solve the question of where life originates on the earth, yet again not satisfying the devout because instead of God creating and breathing life into proverbial clay, the “clay” becomes living on its own through time. The issue of chronology is always pertinent, moreso to Young Earth creationists than to Old Earth Creationists or Intelligent Design advocates. With the literal belief in Genesis and the span of time supposedly entailed therein, a blockade of strong mental resistance is made against believing in Big Bang, abiogenesis or evolutionary theory. The ability to even compartmentalize the most pertinent and everyday of these three is a miracle in itself. But the notion that science and religion are separated into non-overlapping magisteria; an idea advocated by Stephen Jay Gould, a famous agnostic biologist; which states religion and science occupy distinct unrelated areas of concern, morals and nature respectively; is not only unjustified, but a result of blinders similar to biblical literalism and fundamentalism, along with idealistic ideas of science and religion. They can overlap at ethical considerations, but their methods tend to conflict by design, further negating the idea that they are separate, since they butt heads almost necessarily.

The author of the article is in a reluctant minority within Christianity, from my experience, limited as it is. However, any notion of science being correct is tempered by even these thinkers with a transcendent consciousness behind the world, which created the world as we know it with a purpose, usually understood in Christianity as redemption from sin in a narrative modeled in the Bible. There is some good that exists in this line of thinking of compatibility between science and religion. The claim that the Bible itself doesn’t hold the answers of scientific importance; about how nature works, the mathematics or formulae behind gravity, etc; is a step towards healthy skepticism. Anyone trying to read those ideas into the Bible’s anecdotal, historical and otherwise more interpretative concerns within the humanities is, according to this splinter of Christian thought, missing the point. It’s actually connected to the division of believers between biblical inerrancy and infallibility. The former suggests that the Bible holds all the answers humans will ever need, while the latter is realistic enough to limit the Bible’s scope of validity to spiritual/religious issues of faith and the Church.

The fixation upon Genesis’ need to be taken literally exists on a few levels, the most obvious one being that its relation to evolution is not realized by a person who thinks God conjured all the varied creatures “according to their kind” along with humans and they never diversified by species, etc as biological organisms tend towards. This seems especially odd when you consider that a worldwide flood is also a belief from a literal Genesis, something that would’ve radically changed the environment. That seems to create a situation for adaptation and natural selection, if I understand evolutionary theory at all. The literal interpretation of Genesis also insists on a point that many Christians, however conservative they might be on other issues, are more flexible on here, excluding extremists like Ken Ham. Augustine of Hippo, overall respected theologian in Christian thought, was fairly conservative on issues such as appreciating holy music. There are Christians these days who’d share the initial sentiments he seemed to support: that is, music leads people into sin because of our love of the sounds it presents to our ears, just as revealing clothes and the skin they show “tempts” our eyes. But Augustine, as much as he admitted that he tended towards strictness on those areas, was a non literalist about Genesis being a 7 day event, and no doubt also about the chronology of the Bible amounting to the entire history of the world compressed into six to ten thousand years.
The importance of the Genesis narrative, according to any Christian you’d come across, isn’t that God created the world in some strict timeframe, but that God created it (and initiated the evolutionary process over time?). Which would most believers in God find more important: the nitpicking details or the tenets of faith, such as “God exists and created the world”?

The Bible, to most believers, is not something strict and precise about every detail. Many things have to be worked out indirectly, such as the accounts we have of angels and demons. People who take it too seriously are the start of this phenomenon of literalism. No one’s telling people they can’t believe the Bible as a religious text, but claiming it’s a scientific source betrays any sense of what the Bible is at its core; a series of revelations from God, not a checklist of do’s and don’ts never to be violated or adjusted to circumstance and eras. The Old Testament enumerates 600+ commandments, most of which the average Christian has no idea are even in the Bible, let alone takes seriously as a believer in a spawn of the Jewish religion. Like I subtly implied in my “Religion and Secularism’s Questions and Answers” post, the more we begin to understand things, like the Bible, from a believer’s perspective, the more we can understand the diversity in any believer’s worldview about the Bible and its relation, or lack thereof, to scientific pursuits, such as evolutionary theory. Until next time, Namaste and aloha

Family Planning and Fertility Procedures

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/10/my-take-catholic-church-should-reverse-ivf-opposition/

As a follow up to my post this week, “Politics and Pro Life”, I thought I’d confront something of a problem within official (?) Catholic doctrine that is indirectly related to the pro-life issue they brought against Republicans and their budget that disfavored the poor. This alleged contradiction of a consistent pro life position makes an important distinction of anti-abortion rights versus pro-life as a whole in terms of overlapping but distinct principles, since consistent pro-life usually implies also being anti capital punishment and anti war to a great extent. But now we confront an issue that’s deeper with Catholic family values and how technology can conflict with it at times.

The article’s author says that he and his wife feel condemned after an incident where another couple’s embryos were mixed up with theirs and a difficult decision was made to give the child up to their genetic parents. The process of in-vitro fertilization was how this problematic set of circumstances came about, but I certainly don’t see it as a problem if they were willing to give up the child. But the Catholic diocese the article’s author belonged to called what the family had engaged in morally unacceptable. It’s ironic since one can argue, as the author does, that he and his wife were actually trying to advance their family and affirm the sanctity of life at the same time. This is a twofold issue: 1) the couple was trying to expand their family through different means, since, as explained, they are infertile and have had no success through normal routes, and 2) they chose not to abort the fetus because it happened to not be their biological child and was instead another couples’. This is another choice of dual import; since first, they didn’t abort, which affirms the value of life in Catholic doctrine, and secondly, they valued the wishes of the family who wanted a child themselves and carried that child, willingly giving it up, with some trepidation.

The reason the Catholic Church opposed this practice by any Catholic family has roots in old doctrines that say, in simple terms, that children should be conceived in natural ways, not through any procedure that negates the conjugal act. This is also why they oppose birth control, as this disrupts the natural act of sexual intimacy that produces a child under normal circumstances. With this family in question, they had two children, either from a previous marriage or from their present one (or possibly adopted). The church had two potential lines of attack here: 1) The couple could be said to be ungrateful to God for the two children they already have; or more directly 2) They were trying to usurp God’s natural order by using science to have a child through means that were actually more practical and would also advance their family, as Catholics tend to be called to do (you know, have as many kids as humanly possible?) The author agrees with Catholic doctrines concerning abortion and the like, but this singular opposition to IVF as a method for conceiving and bringing a child into the world is a source of deep opposition on personal and moral grounds.

I cannot sympathize either as a Catholic or a father, but as a human being, his insights and observations are spot on. There is no reason the Catholic Church seems to be opposing this except to maintain a status quo of their tradition and teachings on the issue of fertility and the correct ways to have a child. But, like many would observe, this seems an unjustified pressure of the Church to its adherents for conformity to their teachings even against advice that would appear to benefit their overall cause. They are, for lack of a better expression, missing the forest for the trees. In emphasizing strict obedience to such antiquated and narrow ideas about how a child should come about, they exclude many still valued children that could come about through uncommon methods. The issue of rape or incest is not pertinent here, since, as I understand it, Catholics tend to permit abortions in these extenuating circumstances. But with a couple that is infertile, Catholics suddenly oppose any methods that might help them add to their family, merely because it isn’t the “natural” way.

In general, one shouldn’t prejudge an entire group on any issue, like Catholics on IVF’s moral permissibility, because of isolated incidents like this, but allegedly this is official doctrine and would require more effort to change this policy in the Catholic Church. If anything, the best argument is that this is depriving infertile couples of a chance to do what God supposedly ordained them to do, have sex (in the bonds of marriage) and conceive. But since they can’t do that, God apparently forbids them from using science that God also supposedly had a big hand in and conceive a child artificially. It’s not as if the child is less valuable in God’s eyes, so why oppose it except for what amounts to a mechanical view of human sexuality and extended functions, such as family? There’s no real reason, except that stereotype that Catholics are afraid of change. If anything, they seem threatened by changes through technological advances, but, (from what I understand) are not always threatened by change, but are for the most part, as evidenced from their activism against the Republican budget, a group that tries to spur change, at least when it synchs with their overall pro life position. This issue isn’t seen as very important, and even though I tend to shy away from activism on these issues, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other Catholics that have these sympathies. Perhaps the Anglican Church would welcome them into their church, mirroring the Catholic Church taking in Anglicans not happy with the permission of gay marriage in the denomination recently. It wouldn’t be a bad solution, if Anglicans have no problem with IVF. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.


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Moral status of in-vitro fertilization (IVF).: An article from: Catholic Insight