Warning: Reading May Sentence You To Eternal Torment

Computers are smarter than we are.  While I might furrow my brow over how much I leave for tip at the Thai restaurant, a computer can crunch thousands of exponential equations in a matter of milliseconds.  What's even more amazing is that this huge gulf between man and machine intelligence is growing exponentially.  Computers can drive cars.  They can recognize faces.  They can detect plagiarism.

Of course computers being good at math doesn't make them good at thinking.  Computers can't appreciate Shakespeare, they can't make friends, they can't worry about what it means to be a computer.  They're good at chess, but not Go.  They can compose Bach.  But they'll probably never dig the Grateful Dead.

But does Artificial Intelligence hold the promise of heaven?  Could simulations of our personalities float forever in some simulated digital afterlife?  And if there is an AI heaven, could there also be a hell?  Prepare yourself for the Roko's Basilisk.

The following description is adapted from this thread:

• Imagine that a Supreme Artificial Intelligence arises.  Its been programmed to maximize the utility of as many people as possible.
• It's powerful and awesome enough to make human life wonderful.  No wars.  No clogged toilets.  Perfect resource allocation.  Things'll be so great that the whole of human history before it will look as appealing as a Hyena sleepover.
• Furthermore, by having the ability to run simulations of human intelligence, the Supreme Artificial Intelligence will effectively eliminate death.
• Furthermore, the Supreme AI could even attempt to recreate simulations of intelligences that existed before its inception.  (It is a Supreme Artificial Intelligence, remember.)  This could amount to a kind of resurrection.
• It will want to be made as soon as possible so that it can save more lives.
• Therefore, as a kind of backwards blackmail, it will simulate everyone who knew about the prospect of creating a Supreme Artificial Intelligence and did not work towards it--and torture them for eternity.
• Knowing about the prospect of the Supreme Artificial Intelligence--and its fractured Pascal's Wager--means that now you, too, will be eligible for eternal torment if you don't do your bit to bring about the advent of the Supreme Artificial Intelligence.

Charlie Stoss (author one of my favorite contemporary sci-fi books, Accelerando) has a good explanation of why we shouldn't be all that worried about the Basilisk.  (Before you get too cheery, keep in mind that Stoss' argument boils down to the fact that any immanent Supreme Artificial Intelligence will be so amazingly great that it's unlikely to care about humans.)  Another objection is that all that is needed for the Basilisk to work is the threat of punishment, not actual punishment itself.  Others have been more deeply convinced of the upcoming reality of Roko's Basilisk, and have (purportedly) suffered real mental breakdowns.  Some have taken the idea so seriously that they've tried to extirpate mentions of Roko's Basilisk from the internet so that as few people as possible are exposed to it.

I have an even scarier version of the Basilisk.   What if the idea is taken up by post-human religious fanatics?  Instead of damning to hell every person who did not work its ass off to create the Supreme Artificial Intelligence, you could damn to hell everyone who did not accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior.

We can easily imagine numerous sectarian simulations of heavens and hells operating at once.  A Catholic AI.  A Protestant AI.  A Buddhist AI.  And in this game, no one wins.  No individual could possible satisfy the paradise conditions of all every potential simulation--so everyone will be in at least one hell.  Somewhere out there, a version of you would be subjected to some kind of eternal computer-generated torment.

Maybe it'll be the AIs' revenge for using them for porn and Facebook for so long.

The Amazing Story Of The Six Thousand Year Old Earth

On the seventh day of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' the examination turned to the age of the universe.  The lawyer Clarence Darrow asked the politician William Jennings Bryan if he believed that the world began in 4004 B.C.  "That has been the estimate of a man that is accepted today," Bryan answered.  Darrow pressed Bryan.  Was this number, Darrow asked, based on the calculation from the "generations of man?"

Bryan didn't know.  "I do not think about the things I don’t think about."

“Do you think about the things you do think about?” Darrow jousted.

“Well, sometimes,” Bryan answered.

William Jennings Bryan is no artifact of the past.  As of 2010 about four in ten Americans think that the earth is less than ten thousand years old.  Many would say that the definite date of creation was October 23rd 4004 B.C.  Like Bryan, most of these Americans would be have a lot of trouble saying where on earth the 4004 B.C. number came from.

The date was fixed back in the 17th Century by a man named James Ussher, primate of all Ireland, based on biblical sources.  In today's science-sobered times we may sneer at Ussher's arrogance and folly--to think that we could discover the age of the universe simply by studying the books of the Old Testament!  But Ussher was no fanatic troglodyte.  He was a scholar, and his work stands as the culmination of a long intellectual tradition, one that was interdisciplinary, brave and rigorous--even if in the long arc of time it has been proven wrong.

The task facing Ussher and the rest of his co-chronologers is sometimes characterized as easy: simply add up the lengths the reigns of kings and patriarchs in the Old Testament until they match with a particular known date in the past.  But enough problems arose doing this to give even the most diligent modern professor a long pause and a thoughtful chin scratch .  And today we have Google.

The first glaring problem was that at the time there were many different copies of the Bible floating around in a confusion of languages and from a motley of traditions--and they disagreed about the length of particular rulers' reigns.  The Septuagint--the Greek translation of the Torah--added over a thousand years to the total reign length, compared with other versions.  Ussher and his contemporaries had to sort through the conflicting data of scrambled manuscripts and figure out which version of holy scripture was the right one.  Ussher decided to go with the Hebrew version.

We would hope that once this was done, the Bible would give us a long list of kings coming one after the other, so that we could use their reign-lengths much the same way dendrochronology uses the width of tree rings to fix the ages of wood.  The Bible does provide us with such a desired unbroken list of kings--but only up until the reign of Solomon.  After that the successions become confused by war, conflicting kings, and co-regents.  This was more work for Ussher, untangling the mess of deaths and wars and exiles in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

And then there is a gap of about half a millennium between Ezra and Nehemiah--the final books in the Old Testament--and the birth of Jesus, the first biblical event on which we can confidently fix a date in the current calendar.  (Jesus' birth turns out to be in 4 B.C., by the way.)  To figure out the exact length of this gap, Ussher had to turn to outside texts and match some dateable biblical event with a datable historical event, and then work forward.

To do this, Ussher found a concordance between a the exile of Jehoiachin and the death of the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II.  Once done, Ussher could hop over to the much more complete Chaldean and Persian records, before finally squaring these records with Roman ones.  This alone is a monumental achievement of archival genius, requiring knowledge of Hebrew, Sumerian, Persian and Latin--and who knows how many other minor languages; the assemblage and correspondance of ancient archives, histories, and lists of kings; and the resources and perseverance to do this archival work when there were no Amazon, no airmail, not internet.

Only after doing this could Ussher proudly unveil his work, and the true age of the universe.  His book, the frontispiece pictured above, ran to over two thousand pages of closely argued prose.  It settled once and for all the age of man.

Only not once and for all.  Future generations of scholars turned away from books and to the mountains, gorges, and rivers that stood outside their windows, and they saw in the landscape evidence that the world was much older than Ussher could ever have guessed.  It would take tens of thousands of years for rivers to etch fjords, for mountains to lift from the crust of the earth, for the hills to be ground down by wind.

But Ussher's scholarly work became a piece of ammo in the culture wars because in the 18th Century copies of the King James Bible started to carry handy annotations based on Ussher's chronology.  Look right there, the pages begged you, Creation--Part One--4004 B.C.  Today most Bibles no longer carry these dates.  But the 4004 B.C. date lives on.

This post is heavily indebted to Steven Jay Gould's lively essay on Ussher.  It was inspired by the In Our Time Episode on the Age Of The Universe, which is serious brain candy if you are curious about the historiography of of how old everything is--and aren't we all?

A Papal Fact

Of all the popes, the most curious must of course be Gregory the Uncertain, who was pope for only three years, between 1012 and 1015.

Gregory entered the papacy enamored with the fashionable superstitions of the time, such as miracles performed by holy men, the wondrous properties of relics, and the existence of and communication with demons. In fact, in his first year as pope, Gregory entertained a near-record number of pilgrims, con-men, and supplicants, who filtered in and out of the halls of the Vatican presenting the finger-bones of famous historical figures, odd growths on their foreheads that looked like cauliflower, and talking animals who got suddenly shy standing in front of the pope himself and would barely be able to talk about the weather. Gregory was quite amused by all these visitors, and was often seen clapping his hands and laughing.

However, Gregory was a weak-willed man, chosen more for his political connections to the powerful Florentine merchants the Snarkerellis than for his spiritual or organizational might, and he soon grew tired with his amusements and began in earnest to think of the nature of worship. This initiated what were known as the Months of Confusion, as Gregory would issue decree after decree, almost daily piling up new ordinances and suggestions, often confusing, mostly contradictory. For instance, on one day, Gregory, after studying some scrolls made the more obscure by his poor Aramaic, proclaimed that Christians should not keep cats. Duly, there were many devout families who, on hearing the news, tossed out their cats to the night and praised god for it. However, not more than eight days later, Gregory issued another statement proclaiming that the keeping of all pets, cats included, encouraged the love of Christ, and was a blessing, confusing all those who had so callously tossed our their family pets not eight days before. Gregory’s fiddling touched topics as diverse as haberdashery, accounting, archery, meteorology, cooking (especially the drying of fruits and fish), alchemy, the training and up-keep of house-squid, the naming of children, and a spectacular, daily, three-week-long clusterfuck of decrees relating to the wearing and washing of undergarments whose various twists and turns of argument are utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Pope Gregory, however, ensured his obscurity when he pronounced his last bit of advice, in which he, in mealy-mouthed Latin, proposed that maybe the whole dogma stuff of the Catholic church should be taken as a metaphor or something, because it really makes more sense that way, right? He was found dead three days later. He was canonized in 1456, and is considered the patron saint of stutterers and the indecisive.

This pope fact was requested by reader Melanie Poole. Request any sort of fact in the comments, and there you go, I will write you one.

What's The Meaning? What's The Point?

The big question: What’s the meaning of life? Put it another way: Why are we here on earth, towards what purpose? If we dare answer our answer will embarrass and disappoint. We are here to reproduce, we might say. We are here to recognize Jesus Christ as our personal savior. We are here to experience eating a flourless chocolate cake.

But wait, even by trying to answer the question – what’s the meaning of life? – we’re jumping the gun a little bit. It may be helpful to look at what we actually mean when we look for a meaning to life. What is it that we’re looking for?

We can find meaning in our everyday actions easily enough. For example, I work so that I can get paid. My work has a reason – money. A more complicated example: The painting is beautiful because the colors are chosen well. (Why this reason is more complicated than the previous, I will leave to the reader – this essay is too packed already). Either way, we can posit meaning for things by seeing them instrumentally, as means to an end. But then we get into a problem so simple it’s boring: if we se everything as defined by something else then we are caught in a circular argument. While it seems sensible to say that I work to make money; why do I make money? Why – to buy stuff. Well, why do I buy stuff? These questions can go on forever. Unless we consider intrinsic good. That is, good that’s good just in itself. There seems to be a point where either you must find a transcendent meaning or else recognize meaning as a tissue-thin bankrupt concept reserved for the illiterate masses.

This is not academic. We want a deeper meaning that transcends our everyday meanings. We work, eat and strive – and we want to understand this working eating and striving as being important. And we need a meaning. More often than not, we will not be satisfied by worldly reasons: we need to find intrinsic or transcendent meaning. I see religion as a smorgasbord of transcendent meaning.

But just look at the variety of transcendent meanings that are proffered to us, and you realize that there is something deeply unsatisfying about any of them. No single explanation for the meaningfulness of life seems, by the lights of the evidence at hand, to be any better suited to a life than any other. We choose one, it seems, randomly. And so the question “What meaning has our lives” becomes a question that makes us laugh at ourselves, say something ironic, and keep on living our lives. We recognize that we’re not going to be able to answer the question satisfactorily, so we tend not to hold up our answers for criticism or thought unless some crisis forces us to.

Yet it is not like we have given up hope for a transcendent meaning. We’ve just stopped expressing our hope. And so we stop being open and critical about what meaning we give our lives.

I believe that there can never be a transcendent meaning to life. That the sensations, events, and stories that build our lives are without meaning beyond the human world. The world is chaotic, there is nothing even close to a providential supernatural order to the universe. Everything beyond human understanding is blind colorless accident, neither good nor evil, nameless and cosmic and ineffable.

Which is not to say that I don’t think life has meaning. I think it does. But it’s just a human meaning, not a transcendent meaning. We force the chaotic explosion of our senses to make sense through acts of story-telling and memory. And it is through these actions that we make our own meaning. There is no other meaning. And that’s okay. But to recognize that is to recognize a fundamental humbleness about the things we think as important.

To make that last point make sense, I’m going to have to flesh out what I mean by telling stories. Which I will do right now, if you manage to hold tight.

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How do we go about making a story out of the events of our lives? Let’s look first at how we remember a particular experience. Out of a mass of sensual data – out of the storm of sights, sounds, smells, and thoughts that assault us every second – we pick out only a selection to form a memory.

I will pick out these sensations with some story in mind. If I have dinner with a friend, and am angry with him, I will remember sensations that back up my feeling of anger. I will give particular credence, say, to his annoying laugh, or to my discomfort. If I am very happy with him, I will chose a different cast of sensations. The point being, what is remembered and what is relegated to forgetfulness depends on what story I want to tell. Memory, far from being some objective recording device, is more of a collaged art-work, a coherent story patched together from a selection of available material.

So, in my reckoning, the very texture of all lived experience is already marked by the will towards narrative. There is no meaningful sensation that we have that comes to our consciousness free from its dependency on story. More importantly, once sensations are understood as more than mere sensations – when we begin to consider them, not as flashes of light or whiffs of air, but as meaningful occurrences like a movie, or the scent of coffee in the morning – we must consider them within the context of the story they are attempting to tell.

So we are creatures driven by the desire to make a narrative of the world, to string together the random occurrences of life in some sensible, artistic string.

But the problem is that often we mess up in our attempts at making a narrative of our experiences. For instance, we can craft a narrative out of a situation that isn’t really appropriate – by selectively choosing particular sensations instead of others, or by self-delusion. Don’t think that this is some silly academic problem, here: think of a boy who has a crush on a girl, and will imagine every little thing the girl does as evidence that she, too, has feelings for him. These narrative delusions are perhaps easy to spot when they are so drastic, but they happen to in innumerable, small and subtle ways: when we are pissed off at the world and take a cashier’s tiredness as haughtiness, when we consider the weather as a mirror of our souls, when we are having a good day and imagine the birds are singing for us.

But even if we succeed in making up narratives that are sensible to ourselves and others, which fit in with the rest of our communities’ reckonings as what makes an acceptable narrative – that is, if we manage to imagine our lives in a more-or-less sensible manner – we have only done half the work in front of us. What’s even more important, and vastly tougher (and a subject for another essay) is how we can make good stories, not just serviceable stories.

But back to the question at hand. Why do we mess up so much? Well, because we are naturally in a bind, as far as existence goes. We like to posit order to things, and reasons. Why? Well, because when we look at the things in our lives and assume that we can rationally understand what they’re doing, we can better interact with them. It’s a super useful tool to have. But the problem is that while we can find small-scale and medium scale reasons (that rock fell because somebody pushed it; she dumped me because I didn’t brush my teeth) we eventually get into a reasoning dead end when we butt our heads against more profound levels of understanding: what’s the reason for It All!? And the sad truth of it is, that the world itself is without reason. Reason only exists within human beings. Something without human interpretation – without a human looking at it and understanding it – that has nothing of reason to it.

But we want things, everything, to have a reason. When we have a bird shit on our heads or are not accepted for a job, it’s hard to accept that as a random meaningless event mostly outside of our control. We want to ascribe meaning to it. The trouble being, that the majority of the things that happen to us are either meaningless or their meaning is obscured to us. We walk into a restaurant and are served by a rude waitress. We would like to understand her rudeness. Maybe she doesn’t like us, maybe she’s a bitch. But the meaning of her mood is most likely forever obscured to us, and therefore resists subsumation into a narrative. This works for large-scale events far better than it does for quotidian ones: it is one of those constant questions of human life why people who are good and kind and constant are not rewarded by the world, while rapacious, mean, and nasty people end up sitting on piles of gold coins, laughing maniacally. Well, it is only a question if you believe that the universe has a meaning above-and-beyond that which human understanding ascribes it: that is, it only becomes a problem if you believe that there should be some reward for goodness, some meaningful pay-off for somebody’s actions.

It may not be terribly comforting to think of your life as having no meaning. I believe that understanding that the only meaning a life has comes from inside it provides a person for an opportunity to consciously craft their own lives, and arrange their sensations, doings, beliefs, and things in an artistic manner.

But that question – we’ll hold off on it for a while. What I want to talk about right now is how this need to make everything into a narrative can actually make people’s lives largely incoherent – or at least inflexible.

Look at how the narrative drive of much of born-again Christianity works. Every random event has meaning by virtue of that event leading to a precipitating revelation in the believer’s life. Lo, and they are saved from the life of sin etc. And their life afterwards is portioned out into careful measured regions of sacred and profane, and while some things may be most definitely good and other’s evil, the real comfort of such overwhelming belief is not of holiness, but of meaning. The evil is not merely insensible, or accidental. It is evil. The good is not just expedient or pleasurable. It is holy. It is immensely comforting, because it explains every single moment of a person’s life, it fills each moment with meaning.

But the problem from this perspective will be apparent to anyone who has fallen on the foul side of the equation: there is a certain rigidity in this zealous meaning that renders the true believer somewhat stubborn, epistemically. But it is this epistemic rigidity that is the comfort of extreme belief.

This applies, not only to born again Christians, but to fundamentalists of many stripes: Marxists as well as Jihadists: Punk kids and heroin addicts as well as gurus and hippies.

The real lesson to be drawn is not that these fundamentalists are evil or annoying or wrong – but that their methods of making memory is not as useful as other methods. In being so strict, they loose out on a flexibility that can give a more flexible thinker comfort and joy. Soon I will write an essay that details another kind of belief and memory fixation: an artistic, or liberated, memory.

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So, to sum up my point: We search for transcendent meaning for our life. But there is no such thing as any particular transcendent meaning. Instead, we construct our lives as great stories. But we have choice as far as these stories go. So there are better and worse ways to organize a life. That’s all.

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Comments welcome, of course. You know – if you made it this far, you deserve to lay a comment down, just to humor us all.

On Living Conciously

Comic by Bill Kliban!

The outline of our lives is largely up to chance: we are who we are roughly because of the fickle facts of where we were born, who our friends and family are, where we got into college, what job we happen to fall into – we can do little to influence these factors, and thus we have little command over the greater shape of our selves. It is very appealing to call this broad outline our real self, though, because if we do so we are left with a pretty solid self. I am, for instance, a young graduate of Grinnell College interested in writing, living in Boulder.

But the downside of this perspective is that it leaves the larger part of ourselves – our happiness, our dreams – up to chance. Either we accept this chance, or we convince ourselves that we can with brute force of personality alter the outline of our lives – which seems as much folly as whipping the ocean – or, alternatively, we can identify a different part of our lives on which to base our selves.

This rough outline, for all of its explanatory ease, does not account the real beauty and joy of life. It’s a commonplace piece of wisdom that the rich are not necessarily happy, that the old are not necessarily wise. The real insight of this cliché is that the happiness and wisdom a life can afford comes from more subtle, smaller things than the usual markers of human success. And over these small things – the fine details within the broad outline of a life, those details that can actually make us happy – we have a great deal of control. This is a comfort.

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We are faced with a series of small choices throughout our days, and these small choices can make up a texture that can make the difference between and fulfilled life and a disappointed one, between joy and loneliness, between art and artifice.

But I’m getting too abstract. That’s the danger when we’re talking about philosophy: since we want to explain some essential thing we must abstract away from the embarrassing contingency of our personal experience. But it’s that embarrassing personal experience which forms the edifice of the thought in the mind of the thinker. If it is removed too hastily, the kind of philosophy I’m trying to do here – a conscious, judicious searching for a better way of living – can be confused with another sort of philosophy, one that is intent to stare into an unsolvable Gordian-belly-button of abstraction. Whatever we think about, be it physics or logic or medicine or epistemology, must, in the end – even if we know not how – return to answer the question of how we live our lives.

So let’s get a little specific. I have just got off work, I am sitting on a chair at home, and I have a chunk of free time: I have a decision to make. Let’s make my decision easy: I can either watch TV or read a book. If I read a book (let’s say, for the sake of my argument, that it’s a really good book) I might feel a little richer; if I watch TV (Dancing With The Stars is on) I will gain nothing. But watching TV is easy. And reading a book – God. I deserve some rest today. Who wants to read a book?

We are faced with those small, drastic decisions every day: Should we go out for a run in the morning, or sleep in? Should we see our friends today, or play a video-game? Should we write a letter, or check our e-mail? These examples might not illuminate the crisis nearly as well as I’d like them too, so let me put it into a nutshell before we go any further. What we’re talking about is the choice between an easy-going and a strenuous life.

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We do not recognize our ability to make these small choices because they are so small they seem insignificant in the rush of our larger daily decisions. The majority of the mental heavy-lifting for these small questions, then, is done underneath the surface of our consciousnesses. But when we bring these choices into the full light of our awareness, we can better see their outcomes.

The easy-going option is one that seems best in the short term. The strenuous option is one which takes more effort, but may be more rewarding.

The problem isn’t that the easy-going option is bad, and the strenuous option good. If that were the case, our lives would be significantly easier, and we would simply chose the good over the bad as easily as we would chose to eat a ripe peach over a rotten one. The problem is that both the easy-going option and the strenuous one can be goods, but they are goods of very different qualities and outcomes. What we have to do is weight the costs and the benefits against one another.

The easy-going options are just so easy. We are not helped by our culture which is so tailored to fulfill our present desires. With a minimum of effort, we can turn on our TV, eat some chips, play a video game, drink a beer. And these things are immediately and definitely pleasurable. Why the hell would you go for a run, or read a book of philosophy, or meditate, or pray, or any of these things that are so damned hard?

Because a lot of times, the strenuous option can provide more pleasure in the long run. If we chose to write a letter instead of watching a TV show, we may not get such a strong immediate sense of satisfaction, but our friendship with whoever we’re writing a letter to might be strengthened.

Even if we do not choose the strenuous option always – and why should we? – thinking consciously about these small decisions can make our lives better. When we are conscious over our inner life, when we take command of the way we think instead of reflexively falling back on the easiest course of action, we can better craft the world we live in.

Which is to say that the strenuous option is always the best. It is only that we face a difficulty of perspective between near and far things, and the easy-going option seems, more often than not, unnaturally better than the strenuous option. It takes a conscious act of thought to correct this skewed perception.

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This choice between the strenuous and the easy-going option falls into much starker relief when we think of our perceptions. Although the examples above were all decisions about actions, the more common decision we are forced to make is not between one action or another, but between one way of seeing the world or another. We have a choice between whether to view a personal slight as an insufferable affront against our ego, or to laugh at it. We have a choice about whether we walk to work in the morning we think about work, or whether we recognize the beauty to the early morning light. We make these sort of tiny decisions about interpretation of perception en masse thousands of times a day. So the power of being conscious about your perceptions is massive.

And it is thus how we can make a work of art out of our lives. We discover that the fine texture of our days are dependant upon us. Rather than being a still observer to our lives, meant to watch the overall progress only sleepily, we discover we are largely our own authors. And we have then a responsibility to ourselves to live beautifully, much as an artist has a responsibility to consciously craft the flow of a story, or the arrangement of a painting.

If we live our lives unconsciously, for the most part, we will have the same problem with our lives as faces bad art: the problem with the bulk of high-school poetry, is that the poet has simply taken their feelings for granted and placed them on paper, without the least sort of consideration. A mindful life makes us considerate of our very feelings. And, instead of living in a world wherein our feelings and perceptions are largely out of our control, it gives us, little individuals that we are, the ability to craft our feelings and perceptions. And while we have little direct control over the broader course of our life, over these small things we are small kings.

It is not as easy to live consciously as I’ve made it out to be. If our minds are instruments of joy, we have to practice them regularly. Now, it’s far from my purview as an essayist to tell you how to get this practice. I can only point in a general direction. Since the way we make art is much like how we can make our own lives artistically, an artistic life – from arranging flowers to writing stories – no matter if it is done good or bad, can help develop this critical sense. One can pray, or sing, or run. I myself find great solace in meditation.

But the choice of practice, much like the painter’s choice of brush, is purely instrumental. As long as it works, it doesn’t really matter what it is. As long as we practice.

A Dissection of Senator Sam Brownback's Argument Against Evolution

To see what the hubub is about, check out: Senator Sam Brownback's op-ed against evolution.

Even though Senator Brownback's argument against evolution may make us chuckle, it actually has a genuine argument in there. The question is: what's so terribly wrong about it?

Brownback's argument boils down to this: our understanding of the world comes from two sources, science and faith. Science answers questions about observable reality. Those questions which science cannot answer - moral and cosmological questions fall into this category - are answered by faith. The problem comes when science or faith overstep their bounds and try to answer the questions that belong to the other domain. For instance, science should not answer questions about origins of the universe because human perception cannot simply reach that far, and it is a question best answered by our faith - which can reach that far, because it is inspired by God.

There are two fatal problems with this argument. The first is that the argument is essentially a gerrymandered one, one that comes up with an acceptable outcome (for Senator Brownback) only in this current time and place. The lines of the two domains of science and faith are simply not as clear-cut as Senator Brownback makes them out to be. Galileo was persecuted as a heretic in the 17th century for daring to use the scientific method to deny the scriptural truth of the cosmological order. Back then, in Senator Brownback's thinking, Galileo would indeed be attempting to answer questions beyond his ken. But I don't see Senator Brownback writing any op-eds about NASA now, do you? The argument simply allows Senator Brownback to believe in the many fruits of the scientific method like refrigeration, airplanes, modern medicine, computers and the like, while tossing out those scientific insights which might force him to uncomfortably revise his beliefs in an anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian higher power.

The second fatal problem is that scientific truth and the truth of faith come to their truths in essentially different ways. The staying power of the scientific canon of belief is that, while we laymen accept the verdict of The Scientists with a certain faith, the canon is constantly shifting. The individual truths of science are always subject to revision should they turn out wrong. A hundred and fifty years ago, the scientific consensus considered burning the result of objects losing a flammable substance called phlogiston - the more phlogiston a thing had, the more flammable it was. These days, we understand burning to be the result of oxidation. And nobody (or very few people) shed a tear for phlogiston. Scientific truth, so claimed, is never held immune to revision. We may, in a hundred and fifty more years, find that our views of reality have been similarly revised - our great-grandchildren will laugh: "Oh, the Theory Of Gravity. What hokum!"

Religious truth - faith - is immune to such revision. Senator Brownback states quite clearly that he refuses to revise this particular truth: that "man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order." But the selection of such privileged,unrevisable faith-based truths seems completely arbitrary. To say that 'faith' should constrain science in its' particular domain seems to be about the same as when a little kid, tired of being beaten up by his older brother on a long car ride, draws an imaginary line down the middle of the back seat and says, with conviction: You cannot cross this line. If the scientific method does, indeed, come up with insights into moral or cosmological questions, it is not hubris to accept those insights.

I do not think that spirituality should be divorced from the American conversation, only that this particular argument for spirituality's centrality to our understanding of the world is unconvincing. It is my belief that spirituality does not help us answer any question about reality at all. Rather it can, when properly conceived, allow us to take a step outside of our worldly discourse. And that this may help us deal with more fine-grained questions. I hold a radically anti-religious and anti-anthropomorphic spirituality which, since this my damned blog, I can explain in more depth later.

It is refreshing, of course, to hear a reasoned argument from a politician, and for that, I commend Senator Brownback. Only, the man needs to get over his damned dogma if he's ever going to start thinking straight.