Off Topic: Enemies of Reason
My blog has nothing to do with religion, but it has everything to do with formation. Technical formation, sure, but mostly the formation of will. I don’t value people who study just to grab a certificate after six months. I value people who study for the fun of it, out of a plain desire to learn. This article is inflammatory and I run the serious risk of losing readers. What can you do? ;-)
In that sense, religions and superstitions do have their problems. That doesn’t mean religious people can’t be excellent programmers. They are! There’s a mistaken view that atheists like me, when we talk about religion, only want to slander, badmouth, ridicule. Slow down, we’re not that bad. Just as we don’t judge anyone by their color, we don’t judge anyone by their belief either.
The problem is when devaluing evidence in favor of superstition leads to real harm, like the setback in stem cell research. Or when someone drops a serious medical treatment for a glass of homeopathic water.
It’s interesting how many discussions in the tech world have a large irrational component: my language is better than yours, my process is better than yours, my Linux is better than your Mac, my Ruby is better than your Java. People assume there’s an absolute Right and Wrong: for one side to win, the other has to lose. If mine is obviously the Right one, the other guy’s is, obviously, the Wrong one. As Einstein would say (in another context, I know), everything is relative.
Readers of my older articles have noticed that I don’t root for any team. I’m a Ruby programmer, but I have no problem opening Visual Studio and writing some C#. I own several Macs, but I optimize a Windows or a Linux box just as comfortably. Anything that improves my knowledge is welcome. What’s the practical point of limiting yourself?
The motivation to write about this came from two videos from England’s Channel 4: “Enemies of Reason,” a two-episode documentary that could be watched in full on Google Video (episodes 1 and 2). The host is one of my favorite non-tech authors: Dr. Richard Dawkins. Biologist, fierce defender of evolution, and the man who coined the term meme, first introduced in the excellent The Selfish Gene.
He’s also the author of my recent favorite book: The God Delusion, released in Brazil by Companhia das Letras as Deus, um Delírio. That book spawned another Channel 4 documentary, which I also highly recommend: The Root of All Evil?, also available on Google Video (here and here). The second episode is titled “The Virus of Faith.”
Dawkins belongs to a much-criticized new generation of atheists known as the New Atheists. The same group includes authors and scholars like Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith,” and philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.”
The biggest problem is fanaticism. There are non-fanatical religious people (fortunately, the majority). But the fanatical minority is dangerous, and many of them sit in the halls of power, shaping everyone’s future. We already went through an era of religious alienation known as the Middle Ages. We’re lucky to be a post-Renaissance generation. Regressing out of sheer lack of reason makes no sense.
Politics and culture aside, what personally bothers me is the lack of self-worth. I’m not defending the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows everything without knowing anything. But the simple “Thank God” is an unconscious brake. If you achieved something, the credit belongs to you and your collaborators. Luck helps, but it’s just a statistical event. Nothing is impossible: some things are only probabilistically more unlikely.
If you didn’t achieve it, the responsibility is entirely yours too. I feel many people have a hard time owning their responsibilities, for the hits and the misses alike. The credit and the blame for your actions are exclusively yours. Live with it.
Another thing that bothers me: all the material I mentioned here will be heavily criticized. Maybe I’ll get a flood of angry comments, as usual, or maybe I’ll just be ignored. Either way, prejudice will make a lot of people simply refuse to look.
That’s another problem: the path of learning demands reason and logical reasoning built on solid evidence. It’s been almost a century and a half since Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution, and nobody in the sciences was arrogant enough to upgrade it to a Law of Evolution. The same goes for technology: nobody can claim “my technology is superior.” It’s all relative, and nobody here has the authority to create a Law proving such a claim. What we need to keep in mind, to build a consciously investigative environment, is: “if mine isn’t the best, what are the alternatives? what’s the evidence? what are the circumstances?”
Joseph Campbell would say societies need mythologies, heroes, beliefs. It’s a way of explaining what we don’t know and of communicating what counts as Right or Wrong in a given period, since those concepts shift across space and time. As we evolve, we kill one god at a time: Ra, Isis, Osiris, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, and many others. We explained where the Sun rises, where it sets, what’s in the sky, where we come from, where we’re going, and a ton of other natural events.
As Richard Dawkins said, we miss Carl Sagan. For me, he produced two of the most inspiring works there are: the “Cosmos” series and the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Every child should be encouraged to watch the whole series and learn to think for themselves, free of dogmas and superstitions.
As Dawkins shows in the documentary, astrology books and other superstition titles vastly outsell science books. And even among documentaries we get superstitious productions peddling fairy tales with science as the pretext, like the dreadful “What the Bleep Do We Know?”
In a competitive world, with plenty of problems to solve, like diseases, conflicts, global warming, and resource scarcity, we need the largest number of skeptical, non-superstitious brains of all time. Only then will we move forward instead of stagnating in the magic tricks of the past. And even setting the big questions aside, as individuals, we cannot and must not become enemies of reason.
Definition of Science: from the Latin “scientia,” or “knowledge.” According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “knowledge attained through study or practice,” or “knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world.”
Science refers to a system for acquiring knowledge. This system uses observation and experimentation to describe and explain natural phenomena. The term also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system.
Science is an elegant system because the scientific method is simple and coherent (observation/research, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, and conclusion), yet rigorous enough to be reliable, mainly because, by definition, it has self-correcting mechanisms. It is independent of personal opinion, belief, or point of view. The Law of Gravity is the same for everyone, regardless of race, culture, ideology, age, or social condition.
No hypothesis earns the status of “Law” without solid enough evidence for it. Besides, every theory (or hypothesis, defined as a suggested explanation) can be discarded if solid contrary evidence shows up.
Definition of superstition: (1) an irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome. (2) (a) a belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance. (b) a fearful or abject state of mind resulting from such ignorance or irrationality. (c) idolatry.
Finally, the definition of dogma: (a) something held as an established opinion; especially: a definite authoritative tenet. (b) a code of such tenets (pedagogical dogma). (c) a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds. (d) it cannot be disputed or doubted.