Historical credit vs. Ready Made Explanations

by Gary Berg-Cross

Opinion writer Michael Gerson penned a WaPo article called The violent narrative of religious rivalry (aka Love Thy Neighbor). 

Gerson, "the guy who is credited with penning the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" lie line that helped enable the Iraq war", wanders around the topic of the narrative of the West vs. Islam and ideological containment. He uses a very broad brush with a bit of historical interpretation for the reason that our favored "Westernized" religions are better than the more recent creation  - Islam:

" When monotheism is tied to dualism — the belief that history is a cosmic conflict between the children of light and the children of darkness — it becomes “the most dangerous doctrine ever invented,” allowing people to “commit evil with a clean conscience.”

Both Judaism and Christianity have made progress over the centuries in weeding out dualism — reinterpreting their violent scriptural texts and finding resources of “respect for the other.” For Christianity, this transition wasn’t easy, involving the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. But this bloody, chaotic process eventually produced a flowering of powerful ideas in the 17th century: the social contract, human rights and liberty of conscience."

There are any number of arguments in here that one may dispute, but a central one is, "what caused this flowering in the 17th century that we are so proud of?"

An insightful view on this, I think, was penned in a letter response in the Post by Elliot Wilner of Bethesda, who wrote:

"In his May 12 op-ed column, “Love thy neighbor,” Michael Gerson provided an intelligent argument for preserving the American tenet of religious tolerance. Curiously, however, he credited the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War with having eventually created the “flowering of powerful ideas in the 17th century: the social contract, human rights and liberty of conscience.” Those ideas should be credited mainly to a succession of secular humanists, opponents of organized religion, such as Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. “Love thy neighbor” was preached and practiced as much, if not more, by these secular humanists as by religious sectarians."

Right on as an additional step to understanding what it takes to move a culture.  The follies of war and the ideologies that birth them and give them sustenance provides teachable moments when we may move ahead, if we listen to the best among us.

Epicurus & Apikorisim: The Influence of the Greek Epicurus and Jewish Apikorsim on Judaism

Edd Doerr reviews: Epicurus & Apikorisim: The Influence of the Greek Epicurus and Jewish Apikorsim on Judaism, by Yaakov Malkin. Milan Press, 173 pp, $16.80.

Apikorsim is the Hebrew word for heretics (apikorsut = heresy). The word is evidently derived from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus  (341-270 BCE), whose ideas spread throughout the Hellenic world, including what we call the Middle East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE). Epicurus rejected the idea of divine providence and personal immortality. Malkin writes that Epicurus may well have influenced the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, one reason why many early Jewish religious authorities did  not want it included in the canon. Epicureanism, not to be confused with hedonism, was passed along by the great Roman writer Lucretius (95-55 BCE) and influenced secular Jewish thought, and even liberal Muslim thought, for centuries, extending all the way to the Dutch/Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a precursor of modern Humanism, and such influential thinkers as John Locke and David Hume.

Israeli scholar Yaakov Malkin makes the point that “an individual or society can improve its quality of life by adopting the principle that happiness as its ultimate goal, as did the founders of the United States of America – the only state in the world to establish the Epicurean principle of ‘pursuit of happiness’ as a bedrock of all legislation and public policy. The inclusion of this idea in the American Declaration of Independence can be traced to Thomas Jefferson, who was a declared Epicurean.”  Malkin writes that the Deism of Jefferson and his generation was essentially an Epicureanism in which the word “God” was largely code for “Nature”.

Among Malkin’s insights is this: “Capitalism driven by hedonism, consumerism and globalization is generally not restrained by the principles of social justice and legislation based upon them. One of the exceptions to this rule is the state of affairs in Scandinavia, where there is no uncontrolled population growth, and where egalitarian (between men and women) democracy has succeeded in implementing policies based on a free-market economy and social legislation. In countries and regions suffering from population explosion, the suffering of the masses simply increases, while their ‘kleptocracies’ (as termed by Saul Bellow), are the main beneficiaries of financial aid from the world’s rich countries.” (We might note that the Norwegian Humanist Association, the Norsk HumanEtisk Forbund, is the largest Humanist organization in the world in terms of both numbers and percentage of national population.)

Malkin’s book was published in 2007, but, regrettably, my library is so full that I just got around to reading it. The book, incidentally, is dedicated to my late good friend Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the founder of the modern Humanistic Judaism movement and co-founder of Americans for Religious Liberty.

Interestingly, Malkin’s views on the importance and influence of Epicurus and Epicureans are very close to those of Matthew Stewart, whose excellent 2014 book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (Norton, 566 pp), I reviewed in the most recent Americans for Religious Liberty journal, Voice of Reason No. 128, accessible at arlinc.org.

Universal Arguments...again

By Gary Berg-Cross

 

The Washington Post had a book review by MIT physicist  & novelist Alan Lightman (latest book is “The Accidental Universe.”) on Amir D. Aczel‘s book  “Why Science Does Not Disprove God.”  You can get a sense of the differences between these 2 thinkers from their book titles and Lightman takes Aczel to task on several topics.

One of the first is the claims about Albert Einstein's religious views. It’s been extensively discussed and Aczel selectively repeats several on Einstein early pronouncements that gesture towards a Deity using religious vocabulary:

 

“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not” and

“I want to know God’s thoughts — the rest are details.”

I put more store in the case that Einstein channeled Spinoza pantheistic notions that identifies the god idea with nature and not a personal god seen in Jewish scripture.

 

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems."

From  Hoffmann, Banesh (1972). Albert Einstein Creator and Rebel. New York: New American 

Library, p. 95  cited in Wikipedia on E’s religious views see also Jammer’s, Einstein and Religion (Princeton 1999) and more recently Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster 2007).

You can see this humble rather than doctrinaire stance in later pronouncements by E preferring agnostic sounding formulations (sometimes alluding to mysteries) as he said:   

"an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

It is always interesting to see defenders of the creator hypothesis present E’s idea without his penumbra of humbleness on the whole issue.  Having harnessed a dogmatic style Einstein Aczel, as reported by Lightman, sets out to “debunk the arguments of the New Atheists but also to gently suggest that the findings of science actually point to the existence of God.” And so we pass some arguments about weaknesses of evolutionary explanations but arrive at the more contentious point of argued in L. Krauss’s bestseller “A Universe From Nothing.” Aczel is willing to follow this physical argument about quantum foam effect fluxuations producing something from nothing physical, but can ask where the quantum laws come from.

 

Lawrence Krauss has misused the idea of “empty space” to argue that the universe itself came out of sheer “emptiness.” But we know that the space in which pairs of particles can form is never empty, it is not a “nothing”—it always contains energy, and it always becomes permeated by lines of force representing fields (electromagnetic, gravitational, and other); and it is the energy supplied by these fields that leads to the creation of pairs of particles. The creation of such particles is therefore never “out of nothing”—it is out of a preexisting space that is filled with energy. That space, that energy, and the fields that permeate it all have to come from somewhere. But there are many problems even here that have not been addressed by this theory. [ p. 127]

 

The Krauss point however, going back to Einstein and pantheism, is to see natural explanations such as pre-existing nature as preferred to theo-religious ones – existence depending on a god. Such natural explanations seem not only more likely and celebrate the wonder of our natural universe. They have, if you

wish, a degree of faith in what provides the best explanation. But the detailed, empirical one seems the more logical to put growing faith in. Every day we hear of something that adds to our understanding of the history of a 13.7/13.8 billion year universe. Less frequently we confirm bigger insights such as a basis for gravity with the Higgs boson, detection of gravity waves or support for Alan Guth’s 1980 inflationary theory of the early universe period of exponential growth, what was labeled earlier the Big Bang.

The long-sought observations, taken from Antarctica, strongly support the cosmological theory of "inflation," which explains how the early universe smoothly expanded to unimaginable vastness in the first fractional second of its existence.’

 There seems no comparable advance on the theological side to things as foundational and explanatory as the cosmic background radiation.

 

See also Forbes article on the Sci-Phil arguments that arise from an Aczel style book.