How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating ”The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself?  It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.” 

The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist.  Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however.  He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings.  It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.

As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It contains no mistakes.”  Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:

We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

(Page 7).  At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries.  Upon realizing this, “the floodgates opened.”  In Mark 4, for example, Jesus allegedly stated that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth.”  Ehrman knew that this simply was not true.  The more he studied the early manuscripts, the more he realized that the Bible was full of contradictions.  For instance, Mark writes that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal (Mark 14:12; 15:25) while John says Jesus died the day before the Passover meal (John 19:14).

Ehrman often heard that the words of the Bible were inspired.  Obviously, the Bible was not originally written in English.  Perhaps, suggests Ehrman, the full meaning and nuance of the New Testament could only be grasped when it was read in its original Greek (and the Old Testament could be fully appreciated only when studied in its original Hebrew) (page 6).

Because of these language barriers and the undeniable mistakes and contradictions, Ehrman realized that the Bible could not be the “fully inspired, inerrant Word of God.”  Instead, it appeared to him to be a “very human book.”  Human authors had originally written the text at different times and in different places to address different needs.  Certainly, the Bible does not provide an an “errant guide as to how we should live. This is the shift in my own thinking that I ended up making, and to which I am now fully committed.”

How pervasive is the belief that the Bible is inerrant, that every word of the Bible is precise and true?

Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”  My response is always, what if God didn’t say it?  What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words.  What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age-abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious and supremacy, western style democracy and the like?  What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol–or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty.

(Page 14).  Ehrman continues to appreciate the Bible as an important collection of writings, but urges that it needs to be read and understood in the context of textual criticism, “a compelling and intriguing field of study of real importance not just to scholars but to everyone with an interest in the Bible.”  Ehrman finds it striking that most readers of the Bible know almost nothing about textual criticism.  (more…)

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.

Here’s the basic conclusion of this article: “People do not know how happy or satisfied they are with their life in the way they know their height or telephone number. The answers to global life satisfaction questions are constructed only when asked, and are, therefore, susceptible to the focusing of attention on different aspects of life.”

By the way, surveys conducted over many decades in many countries indicate that, on average, people do not report any greater happiness despite large widespread increases in real income per capita. Will money really make you happy? Only temporarily. (more…)

I don’t like the magazine Psychology Today. Instead of presenting the latest psychological findings in a layman-friendly format, the monthly instead peddles relationship advice and thinly-veiled book advertisements. So while I wouldn’t recommend a subscription to anyone (you’d better serve yourself by subscribing to a division of the APA), the magazine did feature one article in February 2005 that piqued my interest: Psychology’s Top Ten Misguided Ideas.

Composed by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Director Dr. Robert Epstein, the ten-part list includes many psychological buzzwords and memes that the pop psych crowd (like most Psychology Today readers) still consider legitimate. I’d like to discuss a portion of Epstein’s list below:

1. Projective Tests

The popular images of psychology and psychiatry have a few iconic mainstays. You know the therapist cliché: a patient laid on a long couch, rambling about childhood trauma to a near-silent facilitator scribbling away. In nearly equal footing, many people associate projective tests, such as word association and Rorschach ink blots, with legitimate psychology.

The logic behind projective tests says that a therapist can quickly dig into a client’s preoccupations and mindset based on their knee-jerk responses to ambiguous things. This assumes that a patient would always see the same thing in the same ink blot; a sex addict would always recall lewd scenes; a veteran with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder would always recognize carnage.

But projective tests neglect the effect of priming entirely. A wide variety of psychological studies have demonstrated that earlier access to a word or concept makes it more likely for that word or concept to recur. Thus, a patient who has just spent lunch chatting with a childhood friend about days long past have a much higher likelihood of “seeing” an image related to their childhood in an ink blot than they normally would. (more…)

A friend recently handed me a copy of Karen Armstrong’s 2005 Bestseller, The Spiral Staircase. 

Armstrong entered the convent in 1962 at the age of 17.  These were very difficult years for her, due to the rigid religious dogma that permeated her training.  She ultimately renounced her vows at the age of 24.  Armstrong has written numerous books on religion since that time, focusing on all of the major monotheistic religions.  She makes regular appearances on NPR. The Spiral Staircase was Armstrong’s account of her own struggles with regard to her personal beliefs. 

As I read passages of The Spiral Staircase, I was intrigued by my own difficulty of categorizing Armstrong. I wondered why she would cling to traditional notions of worship at the point when, intellectually, she had already reduced “God” to a all-but-abstract principle.  Though she seems to be a fence sitter, she’s firmly there.  She refuses to allow any atheist or theist knock her off.  See, again, how should one describe her? Is she a Christian, a sympathizer of Islam, an agnostic, an atheist, a Buddhist or something else?  She admits that she was, at one time in “an agnostic, perhaps an atheist.”  (Page 272).  Is she now really a freelance monotheist?: 

I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham.  I can’t see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of the others. Each has its own particular genius and each its own particular pitfalls and Achilles heels. But recently, I’ve just written a short life [story] of the Buddha and I’ve been enthralled by what he has to say about spirituality, about the ultimate, about compassion and about the necessary loss of ego before you can encounter the divine. And all the great traditions are, in my view, saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences.

Through her many works, Armstrong strives to put the best foot forward for each of the religions she explores (she reminds me of Joseph Campbell in this way).  Her tone is sensitive yet probing; she is an earnest thinker and writer.  She doesn’t just serve as anthropologist of the world’s religions; she celebrates a wide variety of religions.  In doing this, however, she sets herself up to be a huge target for all of the world’s fundamentalists.  Even if you celebrate my religion, you better not go off to celebrate anyone else’s.  If you check some of the comments to her book on Amazon.com, you’ll see that there is no worse thing for a person to do in America today than to put Islam’s best foot forward.  Armstrong invited that type of abuse by writing things like this:

Mohammed emerges from the sources as far more human than either Jesus or the Buddha.  We see him laughing, carrying his grandchildren on the shoulders and weeping over the death of his friends.  Above all, we see him struggling, sometimes literally sweating with the effort of bringing his people out of an apparently hopeless situation.

(Page 277). But, once again, how should one describe someone like Armstrong, theologically speaking? It is not clear that it matters to Armstrong, certainly not as much said it matters to her many critics (and her many admirers).  (more…)

Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era.

Words and their meanings have been a hobby of mine since I read about General Semantics in the science fiction book The World of Null-A by A.E. VanVogt in my teens. This discipline had a brief popularity in the mid-20th Century, and led me to the understanding that an object and its image are two distinct entities. The word is not the thing, nor a map the territory. Here’s more at Wiki

Would a rose truly smell as sweet were it known as “Stench Needles”? They have made me bleed and sneeze at different times in the past. How well would “Wolf Apples” sell at the market? Actually, these fruits of a nightshade sell quite well using their Italian name, “tomatoes”.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I posit that most misunderstandings between those of different disciplines or faiths are primarily due to mismatched maps between semantic entities (things) and the language used to describe them. Unless we understand each others axioms (math term for initial, unproven assumptions), we can never fully communicate. But then, this is one point made by Erich in his Pop Quiz entry.

I have literally pulled posts out of the ground and used them as beams. Had my post physically become something else? I’ve just redefined its use by 90 degrees. So a post is not so much a thing, as a definition of what you do with it. My beam still is a square cedar pole, it still bears something, and it still smells as sweet when cut short.

As I’ve decided to do with this post.

About 20 years ago, I became frustrated that, because of long hours spent at the office, I was not able to read as much as I would like. After all, there were thousands of good books out there that I had never read.  To add insult to injury, my memory recall was poor regarding many of the classic books I had previously read.  For instance, I had read The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, but could I intelligently describe the plots and characters of these books?  Not without rereading them.

It occurred to me that I was reading books at the rate of only about one book every three months.  If I lived 50 more years, reading four books per year, I would be dead after reading only 200 more books.  That seemed to be an exceedingly gloomy prospect given that the culture I inhabit is continually bursting with new and interesting information. 

No, I wasn’t under the delusion that I would ever be able to know everything.  I realized that it would be impossible for any one person (probably for any group of 1000 people) to to have detailed knowledge rivaling that contained in any large library.  Rather, I was seeking a basic working knowledge of many of the basic fields of study taught in most universities. I didn’t want to embarass myself in a group that started discussing well-known literature and basic principles from scientific fields such as biology, physics and anthropology. I felt that I needed to fill my head with more information in order to be a decent writer, much less a responsible voter.

I sought out a philosophy professor from my undergrad days.  He listened closely as I explained my frustration.  He then told me it did not matter what we read, as long as we choose quality reading material.  He explained that all good writers touch the same common deep issues.  He encouraged me to quit worrying about quantity and to focus on quality.  His advice was to make sure that every bit of reading I picked up “touched bottom.”

My professor’s advice was reassuring at the time, but I am not certain that it was accurate.  It is true that many of the same deep issues are addressed by many disparate fields of study.  It is my belief, however, that the various fields of study fail to overlap more often than they do overlap. 

For the past 10 years, I have spent much time auditing graduate-level courses at Washington University in St. Louis (I am very grateful that they offer this opportunity to members of the community). Many of those courses were in the area of cognitive science.  Jumping into this new field, however, was like trying to take a drink out of a fire hydrant.  It was not reassuring to be exposed, week after week, to ever more material that was almost entirely new to me.  There was so incredibly much to learn–this remains the case for me today.

Simply stressing quality over quantity, then, does not a total solution to having a working knowledge of the many basic fields of study. Rather, it’s necessary to consciously visit quality works from a wide variety of fields.  No matter how much you read traditional philosophy, for example, you will never encounter anything equivalent to the wonderful insights of modern era cognitive science writers such as Paul Churchland, Mark Johnson or Andy Clark. 

Then again, my philosophy professor’s suggestion was still helpful. Whatever you read, choose carefully, because there really is an avalanche of information out there. In sum, my professor was overconfident that any individual could keep up with the constant outpouring of new information from all fields.  On the other hand, whatever chance anyone has a being “well read,” that chance disappears once one stops being a selective chooser of reading material. 

I recently picked up a book that provided some good statistics regarding the amount of new information introduced into the world every day.  (more…)

The conservative right loves to use the term “family values” as a token cover for their backward bigotry. Used in opposition to abortion, gay rights, or even the increase of women in the workplace, “family values” summons a particular image of the conservatives’ imaginary era of perfection and bliss.

Many people refer to this image as a real time, probably somewhere in the 1950’s; “the good old days” when men worked to support their families, women stayed happily in the home with the children, no one divorced, and no children ran off to live renegade alternative lifestyles tainted with wanton sodomy, teen pregnancy, or drug abuse.

We may have even heard older people reminisce about “the good old days” in terms that make the time seem authentically wonderful: “no one locked their doors”; “neighbors looked after each other”; “marriage meant something back then”; “it was a simpler time”, and so on.

Even if we don’t buy into the conservative agenda against basic equal rights, we may concede that the world has become a much more frightening, complicated place, and that a time period such as the allusive 1950’s seems preferable, even tantalizing.

Unfortunately, no amount of regressive activism on the part of Republicans can return us to a grander time, because those “good old days” simply never existed. I like comedian Lewis Black’s take on the shiny 1950’s ideal:

“It was called the ‘50s. The wife cooked and raised the kids and sent the husband off to work, where he sat every day behind that desk, day in and day out, his soul being sucked from his body; while his wife, stuck at home and so sick of her daily chores that she slowly became addicted to primitive antidepressants, sat hoping against hope Jim wasn’t drunk again when he came home. It almost seems too good to be true.[italics added]”

Of course, the rantings of a comedian hardly prove my point. But as sociologist Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Black has fairly accurate assertions.

Let’s begin with the notion that marriage had sanctity in the 1950’s. Coontz writes that the percentage of women over 18 who find themselves not currently married hovers around 20%, a percentage which has held since 1900. In truth, single parenthood has increased, but this hasn’t led to generations of renegade youth that engage in unsafe sex, drugs, and crime: teen pregnancies and violent crime have both dropped to the lowest records since the Justice Department began keeping tabs on such figures in the early 1970’s. (more…)

The human brain has a remarkable ability to categorize data. We use heuristics, or mental “rules of thumb”, to make sense of the world around is with efficiency, and usually, accuracy. That vital ability to generalize has protected us from harm since the beginning of our species, and it still aids us immensely in processing and storing information.

But the human tendency to generalize also gets us in a lot of trouble. The brain’s predisposition to throw sensory and contextual data into categories takes much of the blame for forms of human illogic such as stereotyping, prejudice, and jumping to conclusions.

Disillusioned with the failings of our logical process, we may feel tempted to shirk the instinct to generalize all together. At first blush, it sounds like a fantastic (if impossible) way to cure the world of much its ignorance and needless hate. If we could remove the part of the brain that draws quick conclusions automatically, where would that leave us as a species?

Well, it would make us autistic.

Psychologists associate autism with poor social skills, lacking communication ability, and a stubbornly structured and highly literal way of information processing. According to Harvard University Professor of Psychology Daniel Schacter in his book The Seven Sins of Memory, Autistics lack real-world critical thinking skills because they look at everything in an individualized, literal way. This explains in part why autistics tend to have astounding rote memorization, yet lack any grasp of context.

Without the ability to generalize, we would all function like the movie Rainman’s real-life inspiration, a man named Raymond Babbit, who could calculate vastly complex mathematical problems but couldn’t understand the basic concept of buying and selling goods. If we couldn’t categorize numbers as “quantities” “weights” “heights” or “prices”, the cost of an item would seem like a foreign, nonsense concept, and no different from any other number.

(more…)

Here’s an interesting example on how intuition can go awry.  What would you guess to be the primary factor for determining whether a scientist is receptive to new and innovative scientific theories?  Education? Economic resources? Gender? None of the above! 

In Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives (1996), a meticulously researched book that has now withstood a decade of criticism, Frank Sulloway concluded that those people who tend to cling to old paradigms, who are not confortable with new innovative scientific theories, have something surprising in common.  They tend to be firstborns. Sulloway based his conclusions on the analysis of the written views of 3,890 persons associated with scientific controversies.

Firstborns are significantly more likely to “identify more closely with parents and authority,” and more “conforming, conventional and defensive—attributes that are all negative features of openness to experience.” [pp. 21-22.] 

Sulloway analyzed the attitudes of the writers of published commentary regarding the theory of Copernicus during the early stages of that controversy:

[I]ndividual laterborns were 5.4 times more likely than individual firstborns to support Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolves around the sun.  Copernicus himself was the youngest of four children.

[p. 38] There are many books written for a lay audience on the topic of birth order, but very few of them are carefully documented with statistical analyses.  Sulloway’s book is a shining exception to the rule.  It is a highly detailed work that presents statistics that are not merely suggestive of his conclusions, but off-the-charts in an eye-popping way.  He has carefully integrated his findings with Darwinian theory to give it a deep understanding.  Anyone reading this book will never again think of sibling rivalry as a laughing matter.  It can’t be over-emphasized the extent to which Sulloway has squeezed his data in a wide variety of ways to yield numerous fascinating findings.  I’ll start with firstborns: (more…)

Wal-mart is where America shops, right?  Therefore, the magazines offered by Wal-Mart must be what America reads.  On this assumption I traveled to a sprawling St. Louis Wal-Mart supercenter yesterday to photograph the magazine rack.  There were many titles, indeed.  You’ll see them in the photos embedded in this post.  Because there are so many titles, there must also be quite a breadth of information, right?  You’ll be the judge.  I’m putting up this post with the hope that we can all put our heads together and do a bit of anthropology.

Now for the tour. Here are the magazines of Wal-Mart from left to right):

The first thing you might notice is that the literature is categorized a bit differently than it is in a public library.  For instance, the Dewey Decimal System uses the following major categories:

000 Generalities
100 Philosophy & psychology
200 Religion
300 Social sciences
400 Language
500 Natural sciences & mathematics
600 Technology (Applied sciences)
700 The arts
800 Literature & rhetoric
900 Geography & history

It’s a bit different at Wal-Mart, where you’ll find these categories:

• Automotive
• Fashion
• Teen
• Entertainment
• Woman
• Information
• Sports
• Men’s
• Home/Garden
• Puzzles & Games
• Computers

There doesn’t seem to be any overlap at all.  Perhaps the Dewey system can be revamped to take advantage of this cutting edge Wal-Mart catergorization.  I realize, now, that these Wal-Mart topic labels are not literal and exact.  For instance, the fact that one section is called “Information” doesn’t mean that there is no information in any of the magazines in the other sections.   As you can see, I’m on the verge of being sarcastic–I’ll do my best to resist and move on.  I will really try.

Say, I thought we were all past this “Women” versus “Men” thing a long time ago, but the division is plain as day where America shops.  I will have to assume that Wal-Mart makes this stark division because it has determined that it’s simply for the best that men and woman not share certain sorts of information.  For example, computers, getting rich and getting abs mags are up there together in the Men category for the convenience of dudes like me.  

One shelf down, you’ll notice that there is actually a magazine called “Shop.”  I didn’t see any counterpart that might have been called “Don’t Shop.”  And look at all of the puzzle books! Do so many peole really have nothing better to do?  I know that this will sound narrow-minded, but I’ve always thought of crossword puzzles as the kind of thing you would do if you had to be on a lifeboat for a long time, waiting to get saved–only because there’s so nothing else to do.  I know that this is really not fair to say to you guys who waste all that time doing crossword puzzles.  But let’s not tarry.  Let’s move on.  Here’s the next section over (to the right): (more…)

The “One Percent Doctrine” is the title of a new book by Ron Suskind about the so-called “strategic thinking” of our current presidential administration. In case you are still wondering why we attacked Iraq, and you don’t buy any of the president’s ever-changing explanations, you might want to check out Mr. Suskind’s book.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me state that I haven’t read the book yet, but Mr. Suskind’s previous books have been excellent, and this one got positive reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. My interest in this post is just to examine the phrase itself. More disclosure: I’m a PhD statistician and sometimes amuse myself by picking statistical-sounding phrases out of the news media.

As cited in Ruskin, and quoted in the NYT, shortly after 9/11 Dick Cheney said: “if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” What I would like to know is:

1. Can I see the calculations that produced the “1 percent” estimate?
2. What is the confidence interval of this estimate?
3. What are the effect sizes for improving port security versus torturing innocent people of Middle Eastern heritage?
4. How often do you recalculate this estimate? What was it in the week before 9/11?
5. Since there’s a “small probability” of almost anything happening, including President Bush taking up the study of Mathematical Statistics, exactly how low does that probability need to be to prevent the United States from attacking sovereign nations?

In the movie version of the H.G. Wells story, “The Time Machine,” the story ends with the Time Traveller disappearing into earth’s distant future, where the human species is not only living a primitive Stone Age existence, but is engaged in a life-and-death struggle against a violent competing species.  However, unlike the book version (found here), the movie ends with a provocative twist:  the Time Traveller is discovered to have taken three books with him, from his library, into the future.  The movie does not, however, identify the three books.

Since first seeing the movie years ago, I have often asked myself, if I were the Time Traveller, leaving today’s earth to live in a distant future where the human race is fighting for its survival without any of today’s modern conveniences (including weapons), which three books I would take (and that might be found in a scientist’s personal library).  Here are my current choices:

1) A book on first aid.  Not only would this be of value in day-to-day life, but it would also be very helpful for treating battlefield injuries.  Indeed, if two warring species are otherwise equally matched, the ability of one species to increase its survival rate after battle could be the one factor that tips survival in its favor.

2) An atlas.  Again, this would be of value both in peacetime and in war, by providing the ability to travel more quickly and easily, to find water and arable land and, perhaps most importantly, to choose advangageous battlefields and prepare ambushes.

3) A dictionary.  To the extent that a person’s language determines his or her understanding of reality, a dictionary would be a useful tool for leveraging human intelligence, again leading to a competitive advantage relative to a species that lacks such a tool.  It would also contain some information about weapons, shelters and other primitive survival tools.

I have considered, but rejected, substituting the dictionary for a Bible (or Quran, Bhagavad-gita, or other religious text).  The obvious benefit of a religious book is that it can help unify and inspire a community, turning individuals who are primarily concerned with their own survival into an army that is willing to sacrifice individuals for the sake of the group.  Indeed, nothing enhances group survival more than the peoples’ willingness to fight to the death for a greater good; namely, community survival.  Nevertheless, I rejected this choice because of the huge potential for religions to spin out of control.  Indeed, one look at human history reveals that many of our worst attrocities have been performed in the name of one religion or another, all in the name of serving an invisible supernatural being.  Religion can be, and has been, used to justify everything from slavery, to torture, to genocide.  True, it has also built cathedrals, fought hunger, provided healthcare, and done many other good things, but all of these positives have also been achieved without religion (as have slavery, torture and genocide).  This leads me to conclude that religion — at least as we know it today — is, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, detrimental to species survival.

I have also considered, but rejected, a book on primitive survival techniques, because I do not think such a book would be likely to be found in the library of very many scientists.

I have also rejected political books about structuring a government (e.g., the Constitution, the Magna Carta, etc.), because I believe such concepts rely on relatively modern innovations — especially communication technology — that would not exist in a Stone Age (and illiterate) world.

What about you?  What books would you take?  Given the potential for the human race to exhaust its supply of oil (and, thus, lose the modern conveniences that oil makes possible), or even bomb itself back to a Stone Age existence, this question is not entirely rhetorical.