Lawrence Krauss On the Pope's Encyclical: Not Even Close? 305
Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'
ethos, pathos, logos (Score:5, Insightful)
Three modes of persuasion/rhetoric identified by Aristotle are ethos, pathos, and logos.
ethos is an appeal to authority or credibility
pathos is an appeal to emotions
logos is an appeal to reason
Tthe pope's statement may have enough ethos with some audiences to make an impact.
Yawn (Score:2)
I'm not Catholic, so I can't say I paid particular attention to the Pope's Encyclical. But I am also not particularly interested in what some atomic scientist has to say about the encyclical, or Catholicism, or climate change for that matter.
Krauss won't like the obvious answer (Score:5, Interesting)
The Pope holds a great deal of moral authority. Scientists not so much.
I've read Laudate Si'. It's not really about the science, or arguing that AGW is true, or that biodiversity is being lost, or that pollution is killing people. It takes these things for granted but it does not marshall evidence per se.
It's main point is that AGW, true or not, is evil and must be stopped, and it ties this into social teaching by associating the consumer culture of rich countries with the exploitation and immiseration of small, poor ones; mankind's moral obligation to protect the Earth, and it asserts baldly things like "man has no right" to push a species, any species, even the smallest plankton, to extinction (Francis actually mentions plankton).
I don't hear scientists talk like this, and that's fine, it's probably not their place. But evidence isn't enough to actually move people to action, you do actually have talk about right and wrong, and why this thing is wrong and must be stopped. And Francis specifically argues against the idea that technology will one day solve this problem for us, to him the problem with the planet is 100% between people's ears, it has to do with the way modern people see the world as a resource to be exploited. Don't ask me to defend this, I think he's a little too pessimistic here, but it just continues the idea that his argument isn't about science, or technology, or even the material world, to him it's fundamentally spiritual.
And he has a point; why should we care about climate change if the Earth if it's just a ball of dirt and we can just fly a rocket to another one? Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not. So does Krauss think scientists should hold more moral authority than a Pope? Is that the paradox here? Should scientists teach us right and wrong?
Krauss' claim is not about moral authority (Score:5, Interesting)
Krauss brings up points that the pope doesn't _because_ of the pope's "moral authority". For example, Krauss makes the point that contraception is a must. A large world population is simply unsustainable without doing major environmental harm (and may simply be unsustainable, period). Needless to say, the pope couldn't really go there, although he has previously said that people should have fewer children -- never mind how.
So, while I think the pope is doing much good, he is dangerously restricted by the very moral authority you mention. It's a double-edged sword.
Re:Krauss' claim is not about moral authority (Score:4, Informative)
That's not true, the Pope goes there and totally disagrees with Krauss, Francis strongly condemns birth control and abortion. I agree I don't think that's workable, though I know what Francis would say: people should be fucking a lot less and only for procreation. This doesn't actually work in our culture, but as far as he's concerned the culture is the problem.
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I would withhold judgement on that. I have a feeling that Pope Francis is going to lend some of the Church's authority behind the upcoming United Nations goal for zero population growth.
Say what you will, the pope is not an idiot. He realizes that if you're going to head off disaster, you have to somehow limit population growth. My guess is that he's aware that very large families
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"I have a feeling that Pope Francis is going to lend some of the Church's authority behind the upcoming United Nations goal for zero population growth."
Not a chance. It would cause too much conflict within the church - even the pope is bound by the need to maintain some form of unity. If he does want to lend support to such a goal, he would have to do so without speaking of it openly.
I've not even heard such a goal proposed before. The panic over population growth isn't as severe as it used to be, as it's b
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When you say, "level off naturally" are you counting the starvation, displacement and epidemics?
http://www.un.org/apps/news/st... [un.org]
I don't believe the Pope is going to come out and say something like, "limit your families to 2 children" or anything like that. He's not going to endorse abortion. But he's not an idiot. H
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It's a little weird to say that the pope went there when in fact the pope took the position furthest from there, but that's semantics.
Regardless, my point stands: the pope is restricted by his moral authority, and that's a real problem if he's leading the charge. (That said, I think the pope will do much more good than harm, but he could do so much more good if he would tell people to use condoms.)
(I have another response to your original post, but I'll put it in another comment.)
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The catholic church doesn't teach that sex is only for procreation. It teaches that procreation is a defining aspect of sex. Big difference. You're still allowed to enjoy sex all you want, so long as you have at least the possibility of procreation - but if you deliberately stop the procreative part from working then you are perverting sex into something unnatural, by taking away the purpose God intended it to naturally fulfill.
Or, in the Church's own words from the Humanae Vitae, "If they further reflect,
"procreation is a defining aspect of sex" (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read past the flowery language, you'll see that the Catholic Church's position is based on misogyny and the denial of women's rights to control their bodies. Mind you, so are most religions so don't think I'm bashing Catholicism particularly.
Specifically in the Catholic case, it's also highly hypocritical. We have this "divine gift" from God, yet priests are not allowed to enjoy it --- all so the Church will inherit their property, of course, rather than natural living heirs. How conveeeenient.
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Personally I think Krauss is just jealous that over a billion people will listen to the Pope and ignore him.
Such is always true of the famous: they hold far more sway over the small-minded masses than the educated and intelligent arguments of scientists ever have or will.
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...although he has previously said that people should have fewer children -- never mind how.
He may not say it, but the implication is there - don't have any fun.
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Re:Krauss won't like the obvious answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment, and I hope you don't get modded down by anti-religious morons. I don't care much what the pope says in his capacity as a spiritual leader, but he is a public figure that holds significant moral authority. I'm sure there will be a hundred posts in this thread about how "nobody should care about what the pope says," but the simple fact is that many people do care.
And people do in fact need to CARE about the earth and the future of humanity if this is to be solved. That's a moral question, and not a scientific one. Why should we care about stuff that might not begin to have a REALLY bad impact in our lifespan? Some people are driven by concern about their kids and their grandkids -- others might just a commitment to humanity in some general way.
But most people don't spend a lot of time constructing their own moral systems with philosophical rigor. They get their ethical sense from a number of sources, and for many religious people, this pope is an inspiration.
So regardless of whether the pope argues for specific technological or economic solutions, he's arguing that we need to care and to care deeply. That may be important in swaying some people.
I'm not sure I get what Krauss is complaining so much about. This is a theological and moral document, not a scientific blueprint to save the climate. The only actual complaint Krauss seems to have against the pope is that he refuses to change the church's opinion on birth control -- and I agree that the church's stance is ridiculous here, and I'm not going to defend it. (On the other hand, population control is only one piece of the climate puzzle.)
But I have to say that things really go off the rails when Krauss starts quoting Steve Pinker, as in:
The pontiff continues in the millennia-long Catholic tradition of vilifying technology, commerce, and ordinary people enjoying the fruits of material progress.
I'm sorry, but Steve Pinker deserves to be called an idiot for saying something like this. Yeah, I know there's a sort of urban myth that grew up by atheistic activists in the 1800s about how the church has been against science since the dawn of humanity, but the reality is that the Catholic Church has long been a strong supporter of new technology, as well as new commercial progress. We're not talking about the rare ascetic monks here, nor are we talking about the AMISH (some of whom actually do villify technology, commerce, etc.).
If you doubt my view on this, please spend at least a few minutes scanning the Wikipedia article on the history of the Catholic Church and science [wikipedia.org]. Aside from the Galileo affair (which I'll agree was a travesty), there's little evidence of the church being against scientific or technological progress -- for most of the past millennium, it has been a strong supporter of it.
Steven Pinker proves himself to be ignorant, and Krauss misses the point. TFA's conclusion:
Of course, these solutions leave the pope, and his church, with no special role. Thus, while I cannot fault the pope's intentions, which are presumably praiseworthy, his proposals are inevitably compromised if they adhere to doctrines that can thwart real progress, and that attempt to use prior theological arguments to address issues that need to be dealt with by focusing on not only real problems but also on real solutions.
Uh -- the "special role" is the moral authority the parent already mentioned. The only "doctrine" mentioned by Krauss that "can thwart real progress" is birth control, which is admittedly a stupid policy, but it's generally not the first thing even most scientists start talking about in terms of climate change. And the "prior theological arguments" give an ethical
What is "good" (Score:3)
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment, and I hope you don't get modded down by anti-religious morons.
Umm, religions can't tell us if it's a good thing or not either. Not in any objective sense of the word that we can all agree upon. Science can tell us the effects of our actions. Religion cannot. So science CAN tell us if what is happening is a good thing at least for any non-moral sense of the term good.
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What exactly is a "non-moral sense of the term good"?
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Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment....
No, it's an absurd comment. I don't think it needs down-modding, but only because it needs to stand as an exemplar of just how intellectually lazy religiousity can make you.
The entire structure on which science is built on philosophy, which is grounded in trying to answer exactly the kind of questions that lead us ultimately to issues like whether global trends are good or bad for us. And in the process of doing that, it also helps define exactly what the trends are, exactly who 'us' is, and for good measur
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The question of wether or not a global trend is "good for us" is neither a falsifiable proposition, nor is it derivable from methodological naturalism.
So, trend X might kill people. Okay, that's bad, but stopping it might cost Y, how do you weigh the benefits? And you're going to run into people
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Your understanding of this field is flawed, it seems. The "mild warming" you are talking about does not improve agriculture. The crops humans rely on are heavily suited to their environment. Our staple grains are usually less nutritional with increased CO2, so we'd need to grow more to sustain the current population. The land suitable for agriculture will move towards the poles, into areas with sub-par soil (in the case of areas previously scoured by glacial activity) and no infrastructure to farm it (as
Scientists move the world (Score:2)
Scientists have eliminated smallpox from the world, and we're about 5 years shy of eliminating polio. I read about new strategies for malaria each year (making stronger mosquitos that resist the malaria infection, for instance).
Muhammad Yunus [wikipedia.org] is a PhD scientist who started the Grameen Bank [wikipedia.org], in 1999 had reduced poverty by 40% worldwide(*). His TED talk [youtube.com] is interesting.
Everybody is working towards new energy sources: wind and wave, solar (in various forms), and even nuclear. There's a Hackaday prize [hackaday.io] on the the
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Don't forget feeding the world: Artificial fertilizers have revolutionized agriculture.
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The Pope holds a great deal of moral authority.
Says who, you?
I frankly think the Pope and the entire Catholic Church is without any moral authority whatsoever.
Of course, to true believers, why I believe that won't matter, nothing will change their minds anyway.
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I'm really not a spiritual person, I'm not a Catholic nor a Christian and I'm not advocating his position here. I'd also happily concede that throughout the developed world the Catholic Church is viewed with more suspicion now than at any time since the Great Schism, mainly due to it's total failure to address clergy sex abuse.
But I'd say, even given all of that, the Bishop of Rome is still a greater moral authority than just about anyone from Richard Dawkins on down. I'm just describing the situation, Kr
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That would be the billion Catholics that forgo contraception?
Mostly they humor the priest, go out of habit and for social reasons.
Science can say a lot about what's good and bad (Score:2)
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
I disagree. You have to assume that people interested in their (and their offspring's) physical well being, and scientists darn well can tell us if something is good or not. (I'm not saying that's the only assumption you have to or should make, but those other assumptions can be factored in too.)
However, the scientific answer is a much more complicated calculus. The pope can just tell people to stop destroying the environment. Science gives more nuanced answers like: this amount of environmental alteration
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But then the fishermen say: "We'll find different fish you'll like better, just learn to like the new fish," and the bioengineers say: "We've got these fish's DNA on file, we'll just clone them and you can eat the cultured flesh." Are these bad solutions? Why do we want to preserve the diversi
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It's main point is that AGW, true or not, is evil and must be stopped,
When truth and reality don't matter, then right and wrong can be anything you want. It's just arbitrary bits to set.
why should we care about climate change if the Earth if it's just a ball of dirt and we can just fly a rocket to another one?
That's simple economics. Because you destroy a valuable asset and impose an unnecessary cost on yourself. You might as well ask why not burn your house down, if you can just move to another house afterward at great cost? Even asking the question demonstrates that one hasn't thought about the consequences any more than the people they supposedly are criticizing.
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I don't think the pope holds any moral authority. No pope will until the church stops hiding the child molesters and hands them over, along with any files, over to the proper authorities for prosecution. While the church protects these scum from the law then they can't tell us what is right or wrong.
True or Not (Score:2)
It's main point is that AGW, true or not, is evil and must be stopped
Since millions will suffer in some way needlessly if it is not true (due to terrible misallocation of resources), why MUST it be stopped regardless?
If that's the main point, then the whole paper means nothing in reality. It is simply the clearest sign yet that the "something must be done" cry around AGW is ONLY a religious matter, rather than scientific.
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Whoever says the pope is getting into a political (Score:4, Insightful)
Go ahead and mod me down but I'm really sick and tired of people thinking what they believe makes a crap in a biscuits difference to reality. Even though the popes statement may be lacking its a great step to get hundreds of millions of stupid people to start acting responsibly and be aware of the issue. It's just so ironic that it is a belief in faith, with no foundation in factual reality, that brings awareness to the factual reality we as a species are facing.
Conclusions are important here, not reasoning (Score:2)
However, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. The church has existed for longer than essentially any other human institution, and it will outlive all of us. Hundreds of millions of people take what its leader says seriously, for good and ill. Therefore, I don't think it's
Lawrence Krauss.. With all due respect... (Score:4, Interesting)
I really enjoy Lawrence Krauss, and Richard Dawkins, and, alas, Christopher Hitchens etc. I am an "anti-theist" and someone who has absolutely no belief in god. That being said, I have spoken at my wfe's church, cooked for their dinners, and was friends with the last pastor. He and I accepted that we had no common ground in the spiritual world, but we both agreed that community is good, and that creating friends and being good friends and neighbours is good. How could that not be? I stood up in front of the church and said I was an Atheist and that I enjoyed the community. I got applause. This is a true story.
Lawrence, Richard, an others obviously need to continue the Atheism work that they do, but they also need to understand that this was a HUGE movement by the catholic church. HUGE. The pope is a chemist. A scientist. If you judge this pope by his words and his actions, he may be the sort of man that can lead a sizeable portion of the world population in a better direction.
I think "Atheism" and "Climate Change" are separate. If this pope did not do enough, reach out. He isn't the nazi-youth that was there previously, this is a man trained in chemistry and seems earnest. I think this is the best chance science and a major religion have ever had to work together to address a real problem facing human kind. Rather than snipe at the pope for not going far enough, holy shit guys, 1 billion people claim to listen to this guy, convince him to do better.
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As like most ancient religions, they need to keep up with the times. The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now. As well it supported environmentalism for a long time. What the pope did was make this issue more important then the others.
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The Catholic Church is only pro-science in comparison to other churches.
Look at how many Catholic-church-affiliated hospitals and medical organizations continue to claim that abortion causes breast cancer, even though that claimed link has been long-debunked and a great many non-religious medical organizations have issued statements dismissing it.
Re:Reconciling faith with science (Score:5, Insightful)
There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.
The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.
There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.
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It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of premises lead you to assign an equal estimated probability for a universe to be created by an otherwise hidden powerful sentient being, as a law of nature? And more importantly, how would you make verifiable predictions concerning how the world would look like if it were created by a powerful sentient being as compared to by a law of nature? Finally, if you can make verifiable predictions of the actions of a mysterious sentient being, why bother including the sentient bei
Re:Reconciling faith with science (Score:5, Insightful)
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
You speak of one type of religion -- one that is anti-science. You are also invoking the so-called conflict thesis [wikipedia.org], which was basically made up by a distortion of history in the 1800s and which actual historians now recognize is largely bogus.
There are plenty of religions in the world (including the Catholic Church) that have been pioneers in scientific research. Why? Because they believe there is a moral responsibility to understand God's creation, to appreciate it, to protect it.
The pope's recent message is more of this.
The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science.
Can you seriously look at this list of Roman Catholic clergy who were scientists throughout history [wikipedia.org], including many of people who FOUNDED entire modern scientific disciplines, and tell us that there's a fundamental conflict there?
Read about the relationship between the Catholic Church and science [wikipedia.org] over the past millennium. Aside from the Galileo affair (where the actions of the church should be condemned), you'd be hard-pressed to find many other examples where the church has impeded scientific progress... and MANY periods where they have explicitly promoted and funded it.
Yes, there are plenty examples of anti-science religious wackos out there. By all means, condemn their ignorance. But religion can also be an inspiration to cause people to look harder at the world around them. That's what the Catholic Church has promoted for the past thousand years or so. The belief in "unproven" things generally does not come into conflict in the Catholic Church -- they aren't biblical literalists (unlike some evangelical movements) and pretty much never have been. St. Augustine and other early writers were already talking about the allegorical nature of scripture 1500+ years ago, so they aren't the wacko "young-earth creationists" who insist that evolution can't occur or that the earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
It's one thing to believe in something that is against empirical evidence -- some religions do that. But others mostly believe in supernatural phenomena when it CAN'T be proved nor disproved. (This is the true original meaning of agnosticism [wikipedia.org], developed by a SCIENTIST to classify a belief that some statements about religion cannot be proved nor disproved from empirical evidence and are thus beyond adjudication by science.)
If such beliefs do not conflict with empirical evidence, then what is your SCIENTIFIC basis for discounting them or declaring them antithetical to science? At worst, they show wishful thinking. Any scientist who has ever bought a lottery ticket should be drummed out of the profession if wishful thinking should be banned. At best, they might inspire some moral or ethical thinking about "bigger questions" that science doesn't usually address.
The Catholic Church not only was pro-science for much of the past 1000 years -- in many cases it was a PIONEER in science. To not admit that fact either shows ignorance or unsupported anti-religious bigotry.
(P.S. I'm NOT a Catholic. I don't care what the pope says. But I do care about ignorance of history. The Catholic Church has been responsible for many bad things throughout history, but so has every other nation or organization which has existed for centuries. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another such organization, nation, or other corporate body that's at least a couple centuries old and has been so consistently pro-science.)
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You're right that the Church has in some ways contributed to science. And in terms of holding back science, Catholicism is by no means the worst offender. It is in fact quite pro-science compared to other faiths. But still, by holding people hostage to authority (the Pope) and an ancient book, it has also hindered genuine scientific enquiry in many respects. This is undeniable. It took the Church a century to admit that Darwin was right. This does not give me much confidence that truth is what they are real
Re:Reconciling faith with science (Score:5, Insightful)
It took science a few decades to admit Mendel was right, too. Science has lots of authority problems. See Feynman in Cargo Cult Science, where he describes how researchers subsequent to Millikan found ways to fudge their more correct observations about the charge on an electron, because they wanted to agree with the great authority whose experiment they were replicating. Or Feynman's account of how an important finding about rats is ignored by science.
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Thank you for making my point - blind adherence to authority is detrimental to the progress of science, no matter if the authority is the pope or a scientist.
The difference is that scientists acknowledge this fact and take steps to prevent it from occurring (we're all biased and irrational beings so it's impossible to completely eliminate), whereas religions celebrate this blind authoritarianism and take steps to preserve it as much as they can.
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I don't know, it's taken on faith that conservation laws are obeyed because we can't measure everything, so we assume because some authority told us to. I'd say slashdot discussions are a great example of how conservation laws are celebrated based on the great authorities Noether and Kelvin and steps are taken (in peer review and grant funding and such) to preserve these faith-based laws as much as possible.
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You bring up the theory of continental drift. I'll raise you aether, magnetic field lines, general relativity, quantum theory, and many, many others. All of these were met with vicious opposition at the start. Again, the process of science is designed to slowly lumber towards the truth. You can't get at the truth immediately or quickly. It doesn't work that way. Nor does it matter what a single person thinks - the only think that matters is the gradually-accumulating body of evidence and theory.
It is comple
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The vilification of the "Galileo affair" is generally just more anti-Catholic propaganda from the Enlightenment era:
Agreed, but I didn't want to get into that whole mess. I've already explained what's screwed up with our perception of the Galileo affair a number of times here, like in posts here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org].
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Scientific skepticism is an assumption, a conclusion without proof, which is faith.
Re:Reconciling faith with science (Score:5, Insightful)
The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science. I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
You have evidently never heard of the Jesuits [wikipedia.org]. It's entirely possible to believe in religion and still be a grounded person - and it's entirely possible to be completely devoted to science and still be crazy (see Nazi Germany as an example). Religion when taught as a form of philosophy (which is what it really should be) can make for a great moral compass. Religion when taught in the form of governmental law is what's harmful.
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It's entirely possible to believe in religion and still be a grounded person...
That is actually not in dispute. However, if you believe that truth is determined by experiment and observation, this conflicts with the ideas that truth is determined by logic and axioms, or e.g. what is written in the Bible. For Catholics, truth is determined by revelation and received wisdom: no amount of experimentation will have any effect on matters of faith. The set of truths provable by each system do not have to conflict, and each is more or less equally valid as a philosophy. For a further discuss
Re: Reconciling faith with science (Score:2, Insightful)
Seeing as how science and religion deal with different things, there is no "irreconciliability" nor is it unreasonable for a church to be pro-science.
Faith is not separated from the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak.
No it does not. Unless you have such a vague notion of faith as to make it effectively meaningless it HAS to intrude on the material plane. Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion. Everyone would have a vague notion of something "beyond" and it would end there. But it doesn't.
It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
There is HUGE amounts of evidence that it doesn't really work like that in the real world. Organized religions cannot help but get involved in claiming all sorts of things that science can and does dispute.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable
And yet the church claims to understand them in great detail except when it is convenient for them to claim to not know. Cannot work both ways.
Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
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Why does religion necessarily intrude on the material plane? It normally teaches that there is something beyond this material plane, and that that something beyond is more important than the material plane. That isn't supported by science, and isn't in conflict. People do have more or less vague notions of that something beyond, and if there is anything to these perceptions (as opposed to being an artifact of evolution), the non-material world needs to be understood by the best available means (which, f
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Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
Nothing needs to do anything, but it's pretty clear that [slashdot.org] all significant religions do make falsifiable statements. Practically, any religion that doesn't have an effect on this world isn't worth much.
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I think the Buddha's Kalama Sutta [archive.org], called his "charter of free inquiry" [wikipedia.org] , is relevant here. The current Dalai Lama has said "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
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> It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak. It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
Nope, wrong. First of all, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people choosing to believe a certain thing and I'm not some asshole who will yell at the clergyman in a funeral that his beliefs are stupid. But it's simply wrong to say that science and religion operate in different domains. All religions come with a pack
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I'm no member of an advanced spacefaring race but if I were I might find that insulting.
The actual order of events in genesis is:
1. 'Let there be light'
2. Separation of sea and sky.
3. Creation of dry land.
4. Creation of day and night.
5. Creation of water-based animals.
6. Creation of land-based animals and humans.
Days 1, 5, and 6 might be a 'fair' approximation of the actual way the world formed. But days 2-4 are totally bogus and seem to be out of order. The way the Earth actually formed, it congealed from
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The "faith" is that the universe behaves in predictably. If that isn't so, every world view in the world is rendered moot.
But really, calling science faith is like calling two column accounting faith.
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Yeah, accounting is faith in conservation of money, which is disproved by the empirical observation that the money supply increases.
As for the universe behaving predictably, science laws are probabilistic at best. So in the specific case of a photon being measured, you cannot predict which state it will collapse to: you can only say there's a probability. There is an inherent self-contradiction in quantum mechanics between Shroedinger's equation and the final measured state.
See Penrose [subbot.org]:
"quantum theory itse
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"Probabilistic" does not mean "unpredictable". We can confidently make statements about probabilistic things that we know will happen. For example, it's possible for all the air molecules in this room to spontaneously congregate in one half of the room, leaving the other half in a vacuum, but I confidently predict this will not happen in the lifetime of the human species.
Sidetracking a bit, "deterministic" doesn't necessarily mean "predictable". The entire field of Chaos Theory arose from this realizat
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Probability doesn't help when you predict a particular from your sampling of the universal, but the particular doesn't follow your prediction. Yet you still have faith in the law, despite it's failure to predict in a specific case. And you have faith in the law of noncontradiction, despite problems with inconsistency as Penrose, quoted in my post above, points out. Godel also points out that the axioms of math sacrifice completeness for consistency, so science (because it relies on math to express laws) los
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Science has faith in the scientific method, in the reproducibility of experiments.
Yeah, true. I'll take that faith over religious faith any day of the week. How about this: I'll book a ticket on a commercial airliner that has been designed by competent engineers using sound scientific principles. You strap a couple of wings to your arms, have them blessed by your favourite priests/pastor/rabbi/imam/whatever and leap off a cliff.
Let's see whose faith is misplaced.
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Nonsense; you don't need any kind of "faith" to be an atheist. All you have to do is say "I reject the notion of God as unprovable and unnecessary."
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There's often confusion between science (testable observations) and science (reasoning, thinking, rationality).
They overlap in a very specific way: reason is the capacity to think about thinking. Ie. I have a thought, "the Gods like me" and then rather that just start behaving like the Gods like me, I actually then have another thought, "wait, how do I know the Gods like me, what am I basing that thought on?"
Most people gain the ability to think about thinking in their early teens. Until then, we just parro
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You are aware, I trust, that you are describing a very small group of men that made up some of the Nazi leadership. The overwhelming majority of Nazis were Catholics and Lutherans.
And *you* are aware, I trust, that churches throughout Germany had many of their priests/pastors/clergy killed and replaced by Party-approved men, and crosses and other sacraments & symbols were stripped out and replaced with Nazi symbols and flags.
Right?
Read up on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the context of the events related to churches etc in Germany during the Nazi reign.
Strat
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You are aware, I trust, that you are describing a very small group of men that made up some of the Nazi leadership. The overwhelming majority of Nazis were Catholics and Lutherans.
You are aware that the majority of Germans were Catholics and Lutherans in 1938 right?
It only makes sense that a political party in a certain country would be made up of people who believe in the two most represented religions in that country. So maybe, just maybe this is correlation not causation. Just saying.
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And what you think matters because?
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Well if one mass delusion is what it takes to counter another mass delusion, then so be it. It wouls be nice to think people would accept the science on its own merits, but I guess we are still fundamentally a superstitious race.
Won't make much difference to most of the Koch legion, who are Catholic hating uber protestants.
Re:the Pope and his Mythical Sky-God (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the folks who advise the Pope on science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Some names you may recognize: Edward Witten, Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Mario Molina, Maxine Singer, etc.
Damn lying AC (Score:2)
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But both refer to the place the aliens came from. I like the bible cause it gives us a good record of alien visitation. I pretty much hate religion for locking up all the alien landing sites as religious sites that no one can dig in.
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Or the selfish Aynn Rand style would be to give out condoms in the 3rd world.
If the population is in half we could all buy our gas guzzling SUV's, use water and electricity, and still have a cleaner earth and cheaper gas prices and rents/mortgages.
People are inheriently selfish and evil in the Christian sense and will always pick their self interest as sad as it is true. How many who whine about global warming and oil companies are willing to take a bus to work or ride a bike 4 hours each way? No hands I se
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Condoms don't prevent population growth, economic development does.
If the population were cut in half, you couldn't afford an SUV or a computer. But if you want to experience what earth like that would be like, you can do that today: move to the middle of nowhere,
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Half-true: Economic development leads to inevitable (in all cases so far) cultural change, which includes the use of contraception along with increased educational period and an increase in women in education and the workforce. Contraception is a critical part though, because it's what allows women to have a career without having to give up all hope of a sexual relationship and of marriage, which remains socially obligatory in many cultures.
The cultural change lags the economic development, so there's a per
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American Indians kept their population in balance with nature for thousands of years without any need for economic development.
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So copper age technology it is?
Europeans were also 'in balance with nature' when all they knew how to do was starve.
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Don't mythologize native Americans. They were very few in number, yet did manage to hunt a few species to extinction. If everyone in North America were native American today, our ecological footprint probably wouldn't be much different.
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According to Jared Diamond [wikipedia.org] in Guns, Germs and Steel [wikipedia.org], that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere
That's a silly question (Score:2)
How many who whine about global warming and oil companies are willing to take a bus to work or ride a bike 4 hours each way? No hands I see ...
You don't see any hands because those are ridiculous solutions. I do know people who have, for sustainability reasons, moved to densely-populated areas and sold their car -- instead choosing to use public transportation, bike, walk, etc. (They rent cars/trucks when necessary, which isn't often.) Many young people are also making this choice [nielsen.com], although I can't vouch for all of their motives.
Yes, the suburbs and many American cities are designed so that anything except a car is an impractical way to get around
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That's a fairly common clause. See Humanae Vitae, section 23, for a very well-known example.
Re:the battle of the selfless (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice that there's an encyclical agreeing that listening to the experts on the matter is important, and noting that most predicted effects of climate change will not be blessings upon the already poor is pretty logical pope stuff; but there is a very, very, strong case to be made that the Catholic church is...a poor source of advice... when it comes to either population or to inducing social change.
Even when backed by violence, religious suasion has a lousy track record of keeping people from having sex, regardless of marital status, risk of disease transmission, willingness/unwillingness to deal with possible additional children, etc. It also doesn't have a terribly promising track record on motivating to abstain from various carbon-intensive goods and services if they are available.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion; and simply mitigate some or all of the effects of what people are doing anyway. Whether it's prophylactics or non fossil fuel energy sources, it's always going to be easier to prevent STD spread, or generate electricity without burning dinosaurs than it will be to sell people on celibacy and sitting in the dark.
Re:the battle of the selfless (Score:4, Informative)
Negative externalities are not things that people tend to just stand up and volunteer to fix because they are nice guys like that, never mind getting all of them to do so, rather than some doing so and the rest taking advantage of the newly cheaper coal.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology; but unless you internalize the externality you can expect to wait a long, long, time for anything to happen voluntarily.
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The tricky bit is that we don't know what greenhouse gas emissions are or to who. They might well be positive externalities to many people, at least in the long run.
And it has the disadvantage that it is subject to massive rent seeking and regulatory capture; that it doesn't compensate the people who suffer the negative exte
Re:the battle of the selfless (Score:5, Insightful)
The coerced solutions only get noticed when they go wrong. Look at some of the highly successful coerced solutions: Requiring seatbelts in cars, banning the use of CFCs as propellants and refrigerants, banning the use of lead compounds as fuel additives. All cases in which a destructive practice was ended not by voluntary changes, but by a government passing laws and declaring 'Stop doing that or we'll start throwing some executives in jail.'
Re:the battle of the selfless (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I agree that the urban development policies, land use restrictions, and zoning laws are harmful to both people and the environment; they largely represent the financial interests of existing, usually well-off property owners. (But, no, the US is far from the only country.)
I agree that that
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If you think its only happening in the USA, I suggest you visit Australia. Many parts of Australia are being artificially held back from the kind of higher density inner city living that is badly needed (mostly by NIMBYs who don't want to see apartment towers in "their" suburbs and by backwards thinking planning bodies and councils)
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Assuming YOU actually want to live in a mega-city of Sydney or Melbourne with 6-7million people by 2050. The traffic would be horrific and neither side of politics has the vision to create a subterranean railway network (metro/subway/tube) required by the great cities of NY/London/Paris/Madrid/Berlin/Tokyo etc that do have high density living. One with party building only roads, roads and more roads welcome to your dystopian future.
I'd vote for any party with a clear vision for decentralisation. e.g. Victor
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Ummm, I think Danial Andrews (current premier of Victoria who has just green-lit a MAJOR rail tunnel right under the Melbourne CBD) would disagree with what you said about parties that only build roads, roads and more roads.
But I do agree that in general governments in this country (at all levels) don't care about public transport anywhere near as much as they should (or anywhere near as much as they do in big cities elsewhere in the world)
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Change that, and give developers more freedom to build what people actually want
What makes you think that's a problem? The thing here is that people want sprawl more than they want the alternatives. We've had a while to demonstrate better approaches to living and it's just not going to work without substantial changes which currently appear prohibitively expensive.
Re:the battle of the selfless (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing is the science of coercing people to live differently. Is it OK when it's done in the name of corporate profits, but somehow bad when it's in the name of trying to head off probable disaster?
Please tell us how people addressing climate change are acting out of "greed and self interest". And if you bring up Al Gore's private jet, you have to spend 10 minutes in the Fox News penalty box.
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Not the way it's being done today, no. It hasn't been "persuasion" since about 1960.
"Nobody wants"? What the fuck are you talking about? If you want to discuss the subsidies to the oil industry, this might turn into a teaching moment for
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Unless God decides to read the Pope into a given program, it's purely need-to-know. In addition(as is likely in this case) God will sometimes 'preserve the integrity of privileged omniscience capabilities and/or techniques' by providing the data gathered by the non-public method through a 'parallel construction' that offers a plausible but fictitious origin for the information.
Here
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It will apparently also be filled with fact-free posts by conspiracy nuts who think that everyone who disagrees with them must have been paid off.
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The Space Pope?
Frankly, I think we need the Hypnotoad.
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The world is filled with religious people. You had better learn to live with them, and perhaps not put so much energy producing ever more hyperbolic strawmen, or perhaps you should flee society.
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We have learned to live with them.
The trick is to _not_ give their religious beliefs any legal power and humor them beyond that. Before we found that, the world was a truly fucked place.
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I'm an atheist, but I agree with the pope about what's in there. No need to dismiss his opinions because he doesn't talk about contraceptives or whatever, this is not what it is all about.
Lawrence Krauss isn't just an atheist, but a self-described 'anti-theist' who can't resist taking a crack at the Pope even when (or perhaps especially when) he's doing something positive like this. Which is rather a shame, as this is something people of good will ought to make common cause about.