Nine Years Ago Today: Science vs. religion

David Deutsch

A battle of the memes

By Moristotle

[First published on August 26, 2011.]

A book you might like to read: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30—or borrow it from your local university library).

The work of my lifetime

Christian Science 
as I see it

By Cynthia Barnett

Christian Science has been in my family for four generations, but I’ve always known it would have been the right religion for me even if I had not “inherited” it. I love Christian Science because it gives me a God I can accept from both reason and revelation. Relying on it all my life for guidance, comfort, inspiration, and healing, I have not been disappointed. It works.

Science vs. religion: a battle of the memes

David Deutsch

A book you might like to read: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30—or borrow it from your local university library).
    I'll entice you with one of the more intriguing paragraphs from David Albert's August 12 review (Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe") in The New York Times:

[Deutsch] also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-­replication, one he calls "rational" and the other he calls "anti-rational." Rational memes—the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies—are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works. Irrational memes—which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies—reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas.

That parenthetical about fear, does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of what passes for much (or at least one side) of "political discourse" in this country, with its mean-spirited, dogged anti-rationality.

Richard Dawkins

And what is a "meme"—a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his first book, The Selfish Gene (1976)?
    Albert explains it this way:

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items—languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions—in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called "memes," and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

Albert elaborated on Deutsch's view of anti-rational memes. I'm not sure that I've quite understood it yet. Maybe you can help me:

And one particular subcategory of memes—about which Deutsch has very clever things to say—succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: "Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told 'because I say so,' and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)"

    Or maybe I do understand it, if "the full explanation" is simply that it's true: the only reason the children are to do as they are told is that...they are told. Does that explanation "pretend not to tell the truth" by being so outlandish that we at first can't believe that it could possibly be the full explanation?

David Albert

Anyway, the reviewer, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, concludes:

[Deutsch, an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford] is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

Truce to the preposition war

That the First Amendment calls for a truce is obvious. When it comes to religion (and non-religion), there are many potentially warring factions, for even though there is essentially only one non-religion, there's a big raft of religions. And the first clause (the one that guarantees freedom from religion) doesn't protect just the non-religious (from religion generally); it also protects the followers of the various religions from each other's religion (from religions particularly).

Episcopaleans, for example, are fully as happy as I am not to have to indulge Evangelicals or Jehovah's Witnesses (or anyone else who "reads the Bible literally"). And the really true-believing religionists, of course, are generally happy not to have any truck with those agnostic or (horrors!) even atheistic Unitarians and Episcopaleans. And many Americans, including religious Christians and Jews as well as the non-religious, are a little jumpy right now about Muslims, not least because many of even the most religious-sounding Christians don't really take their religion quite as seriously as really believing Muslims do (probably not even Mitt Romney). (Islam after all means "submission [to God]," and Muslim "one who surrenders [to God].") And, of course, American Muslims are reciprocally a little uneasy living in a country whose current "president" (born-again, no less) talks about crusading in the Middle East. (Muslims who aren't Americans are a little uneasy about that too. Bush of course would remind us—since he no longer has Gonzales to do it—that those Muslims aren't protected by our Constitution....)

So, the first clause protects everybody (who is covered by the Constitution).

Whom does the second clause protect? It says, "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Since the non-religious don't "exercise religion," they have nothing for the second clause to protect. (Their interest in the First Amendment comes back into play in the third and following clauses.) So, the second clause is there to protect the religious, that they may go about "exercising" their religion "freely."

But what does "free exercise" mean? It must, of course, at least exclude actions that nullify the first clause....