Against the Stream

Complexity and Nuance in Arguments About Abortion

Two articles in today's Religion Dispatches address Tom Groome's New York Times editorial urging Democrats to back away from their strong official support for abortion rights. Groom argues, as the title of his post asserts: "To Win Again, Democrats Need to Stop Being the Abortion Party." In the editorial he writes :

If Democrats want to regain the Catholic vote, they must treat abortion as a moral issue, work for its continued reduction and articulate a more nuanced message than, “We support Roe v. Wade.”

Both Patricia Miller and Myiram Renaud take issue with Groome's (or as Miller repeatedly, and I assume unintentionally refers to him, "Broome's") argument. Both note that Democratic politicians have repeatedly over the years sought to nuance their support for abortion rights with various qualifications, perhaps the most of famous of which was Bill Clinton's affirmation that abortion should be "Safe, Legal, and Rare." As Renaud states:

But for those with ears to listen, prominent Democrats like Obama and Clinton do articulate a more nuanced message than “We support Roe v. Wade.” They treat abortion as a moral issue because, for them, it is one.

The truth of the matter is that, no matter how much nuance any pro-choice candidate puts into their position, it will be unsatisfactory to those who are inveterately anti-abortion. If the only answer to the question of what to do about abortion is "prevent it entirely" then there is no pro-choice position that has a chance of succeeding in that argument. At the same time, as Miller notes, there is no evidence that a more "nuanced" position would have won Clinton the votes of that many Catholics, and that in fact the loss she suffered among white Catholics in the Rust Belt states had little to do with her stance on abortion to begin with. What's more, if the goal is to create a winning strategy, it's virtually guaranteed that Clinton would have lost more support among pro-choice voters than she would have gained among Catholics if she had altered her fundamental support for Roe v. Wade.

That said, the Democratic position on abortion is already plenty nuanced. As Miller notes:

The Democratic Party signed on wholeheartedly to so-called common ground efforts to find ways to decrease the need for abortion and promote adoption in the mid-2000s. The “Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act” was introduced in 2006 and included increased funding for family planning programs, improved insurance coverage for pregnant women, and tax incentives for adoption. It was supported by NARAL, Catholics for Choice and the Christian Coalition. It was Republicans who walked away from these efforts when they realized they could make political hay by opposing Planned Parenthood and insurance coverage for contraception.

At the same time, the allegedly "pro-life" position is belied by the utter lack of genuine support for the care of infants once they are born on behalf of conservatives, which was revealed nowhere more clearly than in the debacle of the Trump/Ryan American Health Care Act. Again, Miller notes:

Political restrictions on women’s access to abortion aren’t about protecting life or realizing the “moral complexity” of abortion. Nowhere was this more obvious than the fight over the ill-fated AHCA, which would have banned coverage for abortion, and if the “Freedom Caucus” had their way or Republicans had a shot at a clean bill, also would have stripped maternity coverage and newborn care as essential health benefits. That’s right. The “pro-life” party would have made it impossible to terminate your pregnancy and impossible to get medical coverage for that pregnancy or your newborn. That sure is some moral complexity.

There are lot of reasons Clinton lost in November. And Trump's support among evangelicals is one of them, and certainly tied to his support for abortion restrictions. But Groome's analysis, as Miller and Renaud each show, radically misplaces the role abortion politics played in the outcome, at at least as it relates to Catholics.

Are Religious Children More Selfish?

The recent study on the relative altruism of religious and non-religious children has come in for a bit of criticism since it was released a few months ago, to much fanfare. Initially the reporting on the issue was somewhat breathless (and, among my atheist Facebook friends, kind of gleeful). At the time, I withheld judgment, on the premise that a) pretty quickly some criticisms would emerge and that b) regardless, there's not a lot you can determine on the basis of a single study.

Sure enough, criticism began to emerge relatively quickly, including claims that the study overstates the statistical variance between its religious and non-religious subjects, and that its methodology is unclear. Here, for example, is one critique:

P-values are rotten evidence for anything (click here to learn), (2) Regression is deeply flawed and not what you think (click here, here, or here to learn), (3) Probability models do not prove cause (click here, (4) Asinine studies like this are common (click here) or here). And don’t forget that altruism was not measured, but that kids sticking stickers in envelopes was. How much influence did the researchers have, especially with the younger kids? I mean, did kids stick stickers because they wanted to prove to the whitecoat they were compliant or because they wanted to be liked or because they wanted to share? Altruism forsooth!

Similarly, critics have noted that the central terms being measured in the article -- "religion" and "altruism" -- are themselves notoriously difficult to define. Added to that, there were a great many variables that the researchers did not control for. And again, the researchers apparently did not account for the fact that the bulk of their identified "non-religious" children were all from China:

How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.”

By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool.

So what the study is picking up on as "non-religiousness" may be better described as a quality of the particular sample pool that was predominantly non-religious, that is, Chinese children from the Guangzhou province.

None of this would really matter that much -- because again, you can't determine much from one study under any circumstances -- if the authors did not try to draw sweeping conclusions from it:

“Nonreligious children are more generous,” explained a headline at Science magazine. “It’s not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person,” Decety told Forbes. “Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody.” Forbes headlined the article “Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.” (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did—they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools.”

See. Not only are non-religious children more generous, but secularity (defined, helpfully as "reason" over against "holy books") is "better for everybody." And, if you don't believe that this study proves that, it's not because the study is flawed, but because you're the kind of person who doesn't believe in science and wants to ban evolution.

Most of what I've gleaned here comes from an article at Religion Dispatches' The Cubit blog, which deals with issues at the intersection of religion and science. It goes over many of the problems with the study. But I want to stress that I think that the study is suggestive and bears follow up. It could very well be that a better constructed study, that does a better job accounting for independent variables, that has a clearer methodology, a larger sample size, and a more carefully defined central question, could reaffirm what this study does. It actually wouldn't surprise me much, because I don't think that religion of any kind necessarily makes a person better, or that its absence necessarily makes one worse. Religion is one factor among many in the construction of morality, and I'm Augustinian enough to know that sin lurks even in the hearts of the most pious. Yet, that said, I can't help but appreciate the conclusion of the Cubit writer, who writes:

In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and z formulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity.

From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I’d like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It’s not just in Forbes interviews. Here’s the final line of the paper: “More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.”)

The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues’ results aren’t interesting, or even that they’re wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers.

The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things.

Roger Scruton on the Limits of Science and the Significance of the Sacred

The Guardian gives a forum to English philosopher Roger Scruton, who has a few interesting things to say on science, religion, and the way in which we come to know the world:

First, his criticism of the English-speaking philosophical tradition:

Academic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17th century, as “the handmaiden of the sciences”: it doesn’t explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesnt really intrude into the public world. In the early 20th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the syntax of ordinary language, the validity of arguments, something very formal. So when people have a big question, especially now since the decline of the orthodox religions, they don’t turn to philosophy for the answer but try to formulate it in whatever technical words have been bequeathed to them, and when a scientist comes along and says “I have the answer”, or even “there is no question”, they think “this guy knows what he’s talking about, I’d better lean on him”.

Next, on the limits of science in knowing the world:

The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend cognitive dualism: that the world can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science. So we have to look at the different ways we organise this material that science explains for us.

 Third, on why science can't really answer "big questions":

There are big questions science doesn’t answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can’t be a scientific answer to that because it’s the answer that precedes science. There are all sorts of questions like that which are at the periphery of scientific inquiry but which wiggle in the mind like worms: the question “what am I, what is this word ‘I’”? Does it refer to anything? If you try to capture the “I”, you don’t capture it, you capture the object, in which case it’s a nothing, but it’s a nothing on which everything depends. But this nothing on which everything depends thinks of itself as free. This is a philosophical question that worries everyone, but you can’t formulate it.

Finally, on the importance of the idea of the sacred:

Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it’s just a hangover, but you can easily see that’s not so, because everyone has a sense of desecration: there are things everybody values which, when they are spoiled, are not just moved or destroyed, they are desecrated. Something that is vital not just to you but the world.

In speaking of the division between scientific and philosophical categories of knowing, he calls himself a "cognitive dualist," which is a pretty good description of my own perspective. I'm not overly fond of all of his positions, but I think he makes some compelling points on epistemology here that are worth pursuing. Plus he takes some bonus digs at Richard Dawkins, which I always appreciate, has some rare (for an English philosopher) praise of French philosophy, and has some interesting things to say about Christianity and the idea of Original Sin.

Winning the Dungeons & Dragons Wars

For those of us who came up as geeks in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was a phenomenon. I played it for years as a young adolescent, and then picked it up again as an adult. I remain an avid player.

But in the '80s, one theme that continually came up when D&D was under discussion was the idea that it was in some way a dangerous game, one that put us as children at risk of Satanic influence, or at a bare minimum, insanity and suicide. This was nowhere more explicitly stated than in the infamous Jack Chick tract "Dark Dungeons," which illustrated the Satanic power of Dungeons & Dragons in a way that was intended to be frightening, but was actually just hilarious to anyone with any actual familiarity with the game.

And then there was the early Tom Hank vehicle Mazes and Monsters which was losely based on a bunch of D&D-based urban legends (including the Dallas Eggbert "steam tunnel" story).

 

 

Michael Stackpole has written an excellent summary of everything that was wrong with this kind of D&D fear-mongering, but when I was a teenager, it was rampant. A lot of my friends weren't allowed to play D&D, and I was fortunate to have cool parents who were happy to let us play in the living room, on the theory that it was better that then we were off running the streets doing God-knows-what (Ironically, my mother eventually banned the boardgame Dune from our house, but not because of any satanic influence, just because we fought over it constantly).

Annalee Newitz reflects on all of this over at the science fiction blog io9, noting that "We Won the Dungeons & Dragons Wars."

When anti-gamer advocates claimed these tragic suicides as casualties of D&D, many other kids were punished for dreaming about triumphing over adversity, and for daring to imagine that they could be something more magical and powerful than what they were. It was a national craze, and it's not as if this forgotten war on the imagination was unique. Similar battles are being fought today over videogames and social media.

At the end of the day though, the geeks did inherit the earth, or at least popular culture:

And yet the half-elf thieves and evil clerics and dorky kids with dice won at least one melee in this particular culture war. That's abundantly obvious when you consider that the media is dominated by D&D-influenced stories. Meanwhile, the anti-D&D campaigns today have been reduced to items like this shabby little pamphlet, digitized by a gamer who wanted to memorialize a hard time in geek history. It's a clear example of history being written by the winners.

When D&D types win a war like this, however, they don't try to erase the perspective of the enemies who once threatened them. They have too much respect for the source material. In the 1980s, angry mobs of parents burned their kids' D&D books. Those kids, now grown up, digitize and annotate the pamphlets that once condemned them.

It's a weird kind of progress, but progress nonetheless.

Today in "Missing the Point"

Creationists are upset that they aren't given equal time in the new version of Cosmos:

Danny Faulkner, an astronomer who works with Answers in Genesis, a Christian ministry and its Kentucky-based Creation Museum, spoke out against the program Thursday on The Janet Mefferd Show. He took issue with many aspects of Cosmos' first two episodes, including its positive stance on biogenesis and its assertion that the universe is billions of years old.

 

"Creationists aren't even on the radar screen for them," Faulker said on the faith-based talk show. "They wouldn't even consider us plausible at all."

Well, yes. And?

Antonin Scalia: Liar and Terrible Person

So naturally, as I could have predicted, Antonin Scalia showed his hand in oral arguments in the Supreme Court today, telegraphing his intention to vote against the Obamacare contraception mandate and invalidate his own earlier decision in Employment Division vs. Smith. Again, this is not a surprise, since it's well known that Scalia does not have a principled bone in his body. What particularly annoys me, however, his that he is masking his intention behind the "contraceptives are abortifacients" lie:

The Obamacare rule in question during arguments on Tuesday requires employer plans to provide 20 contraceptives, four of which are at stake: Plan B, Ella and two types of intrauterine devices (IUDs) without a co-pay.

"You're talking about, what, three or four birth controls, not all of them, just those that are abortifacient," Scalia said. "That's not terribly expensive stuff, is it?"

So, once more with feeling: These contraceptives are not, not not abortifacient. It's a lie to pretend that they are, and Scalia is using that lie in order to give himself cover for going against his own prior decision. Dispicable!

Hobby Lobby Coda

Via today's Religion Dispatches, I learn that, even according to the Catholic Bishops' own guidelines for hospitals, the "contraceptives are abortifacents" argument is hollow:

The Catholic bishops were among the earliest promulgators of the conflation of ECPs and abortion. Around the time the first ECPs were approved, new laws were being considered to require insurers to cover prescription contraceptives, which were routinely excluded from health insurance. The Catholic Church was looking for ways to quash the measures based on its moral opposition to non-procreative sex. ...

While studies haven’t been conducted in such a way that can absolutely rule out post-fertilization effects, it’s worth noting that, ironically, Catholic hospitals accept the use of emergency contraception. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, the bishops’ own guide to what Catholic hospitals can and can’t do, say that a woman who has been raped can be treated with ECPs (with the caveat that there is “no evidence that conception has occurred”). This would be absolutely prohibited if emergency contraception was believed to be an abortifacient.

This will, of course, do nothing to stop the chorus of disinformation from those who are ideologically committed to the contraception mandate in particular, but also to Obamacare in general.

The Triumph of the Philosophy Major

 

At The Atlantic, Edward Tenner notes the resurgance of Philosophy as a major on college campuses:

One of the many small surprises of the recession has been a significant growth in the number of philosophy majors, according the the Philadelphia Inquirer. It has slightly exceeded the growth of enrollments in the last ten years; many other humanities and social science fields have just kept up. At the University of California at Berkeley, despite or because of the state's economic turmoil, the number of majors has increased by 74 percent in the last decade.

Part of the reason, for this, he notes, is that philosophy offers a variety of skills that are useful beyond academia, as well as having an institutional structure (in bioethics programs, for example) that make a "job" as a philosopher more credible than for, say, a history major.

But let's not overlook the fact that philosophers can, under the right circumstances, make gobs of money:

It is true that philosophy majors' salaries aren't especially high. On the other hand, when they do set out to make money, they often make lots of it, fromGeorge Soros and Carl Icahn to Peter Thiel. In fact, the late tycoon Max Palevskyonce told a newspaper interviewer:

Many of us early workers in computers were philosophy majors. You can imagine our surprise at being able to make rather comfortable livings.

I have to admit, as a former philosophy major for whom jokes about graduating to work at McDonalds were pretty much par for the course, this is nice to hear. It reminds me of the line from Neill Simon's Max Dugan Returns, when asked by his grandson of you can make a lot of money at philosophy, Max responds, "if you've got the right one."

Breaking Through Autism with Disney

 

In the New York Times Magazine Ron Suskind tells the story of how he learned to communicate with his son with the aid of Disney movies:

When Owen was 3, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test. But now it seems that as he watched each Disney movie again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multitrack. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years, words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese — or, rather, spoken English — by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds wecan now help him contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression...

Taking on the personality of Iago, the parrot from Alladin, he was able to talk to Owen about how he felt:

Owen’s sitting on his bed, flipping through a Disney book; he can’t read, of course, but he likes to look at the pictures. The mission is to reach around the banister into his closet and grab his puppet of Iago, the parrot from “Aladdin” and one of his favorite characters. He has been doing lots of Iago echolalia, easy to identify because the character is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, who talks like a busted Cuisinart. Once Iago’s in hand, I gently pull the bedspread from the foot of Owen’s bed onto the floor. He doesn’t look up. It takes four minutes for Iago and me to make it safely under the bedspread.

Now crawl, snail-slow, along the side of the bed to its midpoint. Fine.

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure out my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning.

Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend. “I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.” I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was 2. I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years.

It is a very moving story, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Neo-Atheism: Not Atheist Enough?

Thomas Wells makes an interesting argument at 3Quarksdaily that the core problem with neo-atheism is that it's not, in the end, atheist enough. Rather, it's so concerned with God that it replicates precisely the worst sins it disdains in religion.

This isn't a new argument by any means. Terry Eagleton made it powerfully and wittily in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, and that argument has been reiterated in many places, including this blog, but Wells makes a number of additional points that are worth noting.

First, on the subject of scientism, he writes:

I applaud the embrace of disenchantment: the universe is just stuff all the way down. But the new atheists are so keen to reject the ad hoc faith based reasoning of religionists that many of them go well beyond the implications of this common sensical metaphysical position to advance a bizarre epistemology in which our only way of knowing anything is the scientific method. That is, they insist on an account of rationalism borrowed from the idea of natural science that was in vogue back in the 1950s, an extreme version of logical positivism.  

Perhaps this is just the kind of reactionary position one falls into, exhausted, after endless rounds of debating evolution with creationists. Nevertheless it is a very silly posture to end up in: a defensive crouch. Just because the natural sciences disprove many claims by religionists about how the world works doesn't mean that only the natural sciences can speak truth.

I've tried to make this point often, and with a great deal of frustration. Clearly, science can tell us much about the world, but there is also much about the world that is worth contemplating that science can't tell us much about. To make claims about those things -- issues of truth, beauty, happiness, and transcendence that are inaccessible to the scientific method proper -- is not to speak irrationally. It is in mistaking the boundaries of the rational with the boundaries of the scientific that neo-atheism has made one of its worst mistakes, one that should have been easily avoidable by at least one of its main adherents, Christopher Hitchens, who well knew that there were questions of life, love, and literature that couldn't be reduced to scientific equations.

On religion, liberalism, and values, Wells writes:

The new atheists conflate religiousness with stupidity and stupidity with evil. Thus they seem to suppose that many or most religionists are theocrats anxious to impose their religious beliefs on the whole of society. Yet there are few real theocrats these days, reflecting the triumph of liberal democracy in the parts of the world where most new atheists live. This may be why several of the prominent authors in the movement seem so obsessed with Islamic fundamentalists, who mostly don't live in liberal democracies: they provide a convenient albeit misleading illustration of the danger to liberalism. ...

There is a basic misunderstanding here about what secularism and liberalism mean. Secularism is not the same as atheism. Secularism concerns restrictions on the role of divine beliefs in public life. Atheism concerns what individuals should believe about the divine. Secularism is a political movement compatible with both religion and atheism, and is rather a matter of style than content. It aims at a state of affairs where people don't push their beliefs about the divine on you or even at you, but keep them to themselves.   

It follows that arguments for secularism can come from many places besides atheism. Historically they have often come from and been institutionalised by religionists, as in America. (As is also the case with other aspects of ethical progress associated with liberalism, such as abolition, gay marriage, women's reproductive rights, and so forth.)  From the perspective of liberalism the important issue is not whether someone has religious beliefs, but the extent to which they are reasonable in the way they hold them, that is, whether they abjure imposing their views on others. The militancy of the new atheist movement bears a worrying resemblance to the unreasonableness of the fundamentalist theocrats they worry about so much.

And here again, the insistance of neo-atheists that religion has no constructive and positive role to play in society, apart from being ahistorical and unnecessarily alienating to potential allies in the religious world, also suggests exactly the key issue that Wells is concerned with, namely the way that atheism becomes a religion unto itself, precisely because it is so concerned with what those religious people over there are doing. Wells, by contrast, takes what he deems to be the superior position: He just doesn't care that much about religion:

This new atheism isn't nearly godless enough for me. Its proponents seem somewhat obsessed with the quite unremarkable fact that God doesn't exist. Indeed, it seems so central to their identity - they seem to substantially organise their lives around it - that I find it hard to tell the difference between them and religionists.  

Certainly one can't distinguish them straightforwardly in terms of 'unbelievers' vs 'believers'. These atheists are believers. They hold very strong religious beliefs - about the existence of God, the divine nature of the universe, the proper interpretation of sacred texts, and so on. The fact that they are all negative in content doesn't mean that they aren't powerful religious beliefs. After all, negative beliefs are central to many religions (e.g. that there is no more than one god, or, in some versions of Buddhism, that there are no gods).

Of course, neo-atheists could respond, with a great deal of justice, that they are forced to discuss religion precisely because religious people force their way into public debate so often and so obnoxiously. But this excuse often feels fairly hollow. Bill Maher takes every possible opportunity to take gratuitous swipes at religion, even when it's a subject that he could easily avoid. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his contempt for religion is as much a part of his self-identity as my embrace of religion.