Bridge of faith

I was almost done with walking the full clockwise loop by the river.

Starting on one side near my home, I walk for a while to a bridge that gets me to the other side.  And then towards the end of the loop, another bridge to re-cross the river.

It was on that second bridge that I spotted two older people and their bikes.  The man seemed to be getting ready to leave, and the woman appeared to have decided that the bench where she was sitting would be her spot for a while.

I neared them.  They both looked 70-plus.  She had an accordion resting across her chest and abdomen.

The woman waved her hand.

I looked at her and waved out as I continued walking.

"Jesus loves you," she said.

"Thanks."

To believers, Jesus rose from the dead.  Not right away, but more than two days after he died.

To have that kind of unshakable belief is something.  Of course, every religion has something comparable that is the foundation of the faith that their followers have.

The faithful's claims about Jesus are extraordinary claims.

The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 

The extraordinary evidence is not there.  It is the same case with other religions too.

"In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it a truth.

Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.

The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:

"To him, your celebration is a sham"

I blogged about Frederick Douglass' "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" in 2017.

We continue to struggle with the issues that Douglass raised in that powerful and compelling oration.  The descendants of the enslaved people continue to be treated as less than equal, and all we can do is do our part to make sure that Black Lives Matter.

Meanwhile, the original people of this land, who were systematically wiped out by the settler whites, were put through another round of torture when tRump decided to hold a fireworks rally at Mt. Rushmore.  If you need a reminder on why that is painful site:

The insult of Rushmore to some Sioux is at least three-fold:
1. It was built on land the government took from them.
2. The Black Hills in particular are considered sacred ground.
3.The monument celebrates the European settlers who killed so many Native Americans and appropriated their land.

Sure, Washington and Jefferson owned human beings as property.  But, didn't Lincoln free the slaves?

Abraham Lincoln famously emancipated slaves, but he supported eradicating Indian tribes from western lands and approved America’s largest-ever mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato for their alleged crimes in the 1862 war along the Minnesota River.
Teddy Roosevelt, in his “The Winning of the West,” wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are … .”

All these bring me back to the Frederick Douglass speech.

Back in high school, my friend and classmate, Chandru, had a record player, in which he played for a couple of us who had gone over to his home an LP of a music group called ABBA.  And soon after that, I came to know the music of another group, Boney M, especially the one that began with "By the rivers of Babylon ..."  That opening line is from "a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137."

That tidbit is merely the starting point for my ignorance.  This essay begins with:

On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137 – best known for its opening line, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.
Not only did it inspire the famous abolitionist; this 2,500-year-old Hebrew psalm has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African Americans.

I read Douglass' speech. Or, at least most of it.

It is powerful. It is moving. It is a must-read.

It will be a gross injustice to excerpt even a single sentence from that speech.  With all the apologies, and my ignorance as an excuse, I will wrap up this post with the following lines from Frederick Douglass:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. 

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

Two days ago, I wrote about the mad science that "pure research" can sometimes be.  That post itself was a follow-up to another post on the primacy of science, in which I yet again worried about science and technology that is disconnected from the humanities and the social sciences.

It is not that I am anti-science, unlike the nutcases who elected the anti-science-in-chief, whose scientific proclamations include: Windmills cause cancer; hurricanes can be nuked; ingesting bleach will prevent COVID-19; vaccination causes autism; and more.

Science, as I have often described even knowledge to students, is like the kitchen knife.  One can use a kitchen knife to create tasty and healthy dishes, or one can also go the OJ route.

Richard Feyman gives me yet another metaphor to think about the value of science.  He draws on a Buddhist thought: "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."  The same key that opens the gates of heaven also opens hell's gates. The question then is are we at the gates of hell or heaven, and how do we know we are on the way to heaven or hell?

Of the three values that Feynman lists, I find the following to be critical:

I would now like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little less direct, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true.

On top of this varying degrees of certainty, the sciences, Feynman writes, "do not directly teach good and bad."  Consider an example that he gives:

Communications between nations must promote understanding - so went another dream. But the machines of communication can be manipulated. What is communicated can be truth or lie. Communication is a strong force, but also for either good or evil.

Reminds you of Facebook, and other communication channels in which manipulation is the game that is played for fortune and power?

Feynman wrote that in 1955.  Yes, in 1955!

He concludes with this:

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

This is how even this mediocre teacher engages with his students at a podunk university.  But, and as one whose initial training was in science and technology, I have also worried for long that the science that takes us to heaven is losing the on public relations front because science rarely ever offers the certainty that we humans crave for:

A refreshing feeling that we don't know and we are trying our best to find out.  What we know now is incredibly more than what people knew only a few generations ago.  And there is a good chance that quote a bit of what we now know will be overthrown in a couple of generations.  It is awesome.
But, we humans like a clear story, a story that does not keep changing.  We like narratives that provide us with a sense of certainty.

So, when a narcissistic sociopath proclaims with certainty that he alone can fix all our problems, it does not surprise me one bit that his certainty beat the crap out of the varying degrees of uncertainty that a scientific and rational mind offers.

What is the way forward then?

It is a struggle to fight for truth and to know.  Our fantastic lives today are possible thanks to the people who engaged in this struggle for hundreds of years.  As Feynman wrote:

It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

We have the key; we just need to figure out the path towards the gates of heaven.