Wrong Again!

That is to say, Fr. A. has cruelly misjudged somebody, and hopes to rectify the mistake.  A few hours ago, we lumped together three accomplished scientists who were also amateur theologians -- Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Christoph Rothmann.  Although brilliant, we proposed that all three were, theologically speaking, crackpots.

The Egg's Department of Overreaching Claims has asked us to issue a formal apology.

Based on this paper by Miguel A. Granada, it appears that Christoph Rothmann, who had studied both theology and mathematics at Luther's own university in the 1570s, was not a crackpot at all.  In his correspondence with Tycho Brahe (also a Lutheran, of course), Rothmann defended the heliocentrism of Copernicus against Brahe's hybrid geo-heliocentric theory.  But beyond that, both men, along with Melanchthon's son-in-law Caspar Peucer, attempted a task that occupied many of the finest minds of the 17th century:  to reconcile the newly powerful (because newly available) Christian Scriptures with the emerging conclusions of the natural sciences.

Both Brahe and Rothmann took for granted the reliability of the Bible.  But they differed in their understanding of just what its "reliability" entailed.  Rothmann argued for what is sometimes called God's "accomodation" of the Bible to human understanding:

Authority of Sacred Scripture is no obstacle [to heliocentrism]. It is not written solely for me and for you, but for all men; and it speaks after their capacity of understanding, as all Theologians declare in the exposition of the first chapter of Genesis. Otherwise the moon would be, against all demonstrations of geometry, greater than all other stars.... God speaks accommodating Himself to the capacity of the Hebrews.

This does not mean that God dumbed it down for us mere mortals -- well, not exactly.  It means that the Bible isn't a science textbook, and was never meant to be one.  As Granada says:

Sustained by a long line of scholars stretching from Augustine to Rheticus and Calvin in the sixteenth century, the notion of divine accommodation to common knowledge also employed by Rothmann implied that the intention of the Bible was to teach mankind in matters pertaining to God’s will and his promise of human salvation, not to impart scientific knowledge on cosmological matters irrelevant to its principal end.

This seems obvious, really, to everyone except the Creationist whackjobs in Texas (and, as it happens, to Caspar Peucer -- but that's another story).  Brahe himself embraced a limited accomodationism.  But

... Rothmann went much further [than these other scholars] in conceiving of accommodation in the most absolute of terms; he therefore excluded the possibility of any relevance of Scripture whatsoever to cosmological matters. 

Now, this is indeed a radical stance by theological standards -- certainly by 17th-century standards, and to some degree even today.  It needs to be qualified somewhat; as Granada says, for Rothmann Scripture did speak to "metascientific [and] metatheoretical questions, such as the encouragement or promotion of the quest for a scientific cosmology." In plain words, the Bible teaches us to love all truth, even when the truths it teaches are not scientific ones.

Rothmann, it seems, offers a reconciliation of the natural and theological sciences (or, if you must, of nature and revelation) which would make sense to many thoughtful readers even in the present day.  He and his collocutors defy the popular caricature of Renaissance scientists struggling under the yoke of a superstitious religious establishment which denounced them all as witches.  On the contrary, they appear to have embraced their religious faith with zeal -- even if it was sometimes, as befits not only scientists but all Christians -- a critical zeal.

Good Science Is Good Religion

Everybody knows that Copernicus figured out that the earth moves around the sun, that Galieo proved him right by looking through a telescope, and that the Roman Catholic Church tried to shut Galileo down because it believed, for theological reasons, that Copernicus could not be correct.

Right?  Isn't that what everybody knows?

Probably, more or less -- but if so, this is one more instance in which what everybody "knows" is not true.

An article in the current Scientific American* neatly summarizes a much more complex story.  In fact, as Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney show, the ideas that Copernicus proposed in his 1543 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium -- although eventually proven to be true -- did not fit with the best experimental evidence available to the scientific community of his time.

In addition to the problem of how something as large as the Earth could move, a matter that would not be fully explicable before Newton's Laws of Motion, would-be Copernicans were troubled by the absence of a measurable annual stellar parallax, which suggested that the diameter of Earth's still-hypothetical orbit around the sun was, when compared to  its distance from the stars, far smaller than previously believed.  There was also serious question about the size of the stars in a Copernican system, since their (apparently, but not really) fixed width would make them vastly larger than anbody had reason to imagine.

The heliocentric model of Copernicus was directly challenged by another brilliant and heavily-funded astronomer, Tycho Brahe.  Tycho proposed a"geoheliocentric" model, in which the sun, moon and stars orbit an immobile earth, while the planets circle the sun.  He attempted to reconcile the elegance of Copernicus' calculations with the other evidence, such as it was.

Galileo's subsequent observations, such as the existence of Jupiter's moons, disproved the Ptolemaic cosmology -- but were compatible with Brahe's system.  In other words, Galileo's oservations "were not  .. understood [by contemporary astronomers] as  proof that Earth revolves around the sun."

The upshot is that it took roughly 200 years for the question of heliocentrism to be settled among scientists.  In addition to Kepler and Newton, the contributions of Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis were required.  It was not until 1838 that Friedrich Bessel measured the annual stellar parallax and George Airy "produced the first full theoretical explanation for why stars appear to be wider than they are."  So, although by the late 17th century a growing majority of scientists accepted the Copernican model, they did so, as Danielson and Graney observe, "in the face of scientific difficulties."

Danielson and Graney are interested in the large historical question of how the scientific community is,  often and rightly, reluctant to embrace radically new ideas before a significant body of observational data can be adduced to support them:

Back in [Galileo's day], those opposed to Copernicanism had some quite respectable, coherent, observationally based science on their side.  They were eventually proved wrong, but that did not make them bad scientists.  In fact, rigorously disproving the strong arguments of other was part of the challenge, as well as part of the fun, of doing science.

True, by all means.  We at the Egg have another thread to pick at in this story, though, which is the oft-misrepresented role of religion in the history of cosmology.

We have often observed that, despite the weird mythologies of Fundamentalism and Dawkinsism alike, historic Christianity has never been profoundly hostile to the natural sciences.  More often than not, the Church has been deeply and seriously engaged in reading "the book of nature," seeing in it a revelation of God's will that is comparable in majesty to, if different in kind from, the revelation offered in the Bible.  Especially in the Renaissance, the Church was an active and generous patron of science.  Galileo himself worked for the pope, and popes up to the present day have continued to employ court astronomers.

So it is no surprise that, as the models of celestial motion were debated in the 16th and 17th centuries, churchmen would take an interest in the discussion.  And this is where Danielson and Graney observe an interesting irony:

Rather than give up their theory in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, Copernicans were forced to appeal to divine omnipotence.

They cite a Copernican named Christoph Rothmann, writing to Brahe, and arguing that in fact stellar distances could be as large as the Copernicans estimated on the grounds that God was a great king who deserved a great palace.

(Side note:  Rothmann eventually visited Denmark, studied the stars and argued cosmology with Brahe, then disappeared to his hometown to publish some now-lost theological treatises.  [He had studied theology at Wittenberg.] Brahe's famous assistant, Johannes Kepler, seems to have viewed astronomy as a largely religious undertaking.  Clearly, Newton was not the only early astronomer to be an amateur theologian.  Sadly, we know that Newton was a crackpot, and are inclined to suspect the same of Rothmann and Kepler.  Perhaps not incidentally, they were all Protestants.)

In response to the Copernicans, it was Giovanni Battista Riccioli -- both an astronomer and a Jesuit priest -- who argued, in effect, that God should be left out of the cosmological question:  "Even if this falsehood [i.e., the claim that the stars were far away to satisfy God's dignity] cannot be refuted, it cannot satisfy the more prudent men."  Again, he was defending the wrong model -- but please note this representative of a zealous religious order, and younger contemporary of Galileo, attempting to ague that scientific questions should not be resolved by an appeal to theology.

Our point here, and it is one that can never be made too often by and among people with a commitment to traditional Christianity, is that the Church is not and never has been opposed to good science, because good science -- like good religion -- is an honest inquiry into the nature of reality.  No matter what anybody tells you, there is no war between science and religion, at least from the perspective of religion.  And while the story of Galileo is very complicated, taking place in the midst of tumultuous century, it is not fair to say that the Roman Catholic Church, much less all of Christianity, and far less "religion" in the abstract, is its villain.

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*Dennis Danielson and Christopher M.Graney, "The Case Aginst Copernicus," in Scientific American, Jan. 2014, 72-77.  The web version is behind a paywall at this writing.

The Big Chill

This is what it just have felt like, long ago, when on a pleasant spring day the tranquility of your village was interrupted by a single horseman, an arrow protruding from his blood-caked leather vest, arrived at the town well and slipped from his saddle, barely able to mouth out the message he had spent himself to deliver:  "The Mongols are coming."

That sense of a deadly and implacable force readying itself just over the horizon, moving inevitably toward you, is how we in the Old Dominion feel about the "polar vortex" that has already gripped much of the United States.

At the moment, we're warm by the standards of winter -- last night's rain washed away most of the snow, today is pleasant enough that you might skip the coat if you were only headed out for a few minutes.  Somewhere in the region, a young man is almost certainly wearing cargo shorts.  He looks like an idiot, but he's doing it, because there's always one guy like that.

He'll change his tune tomorrow.

The temperatures are expected to drop about 40 degrees F over the next few hours, to near-zero.  The wind chill will make it feel like twenty-five below.  It will still be warmer than places north and west of us, but it may be colder than the kids in our youth group have ever experienced in their lives.  Some people will discover that their homes were not constructed or insulated  to keep out that sort of cold.  Cities and larger towns will set up warming centers, but many of the people who should got to them won't.  A few people may die -- cold especially kills the old, the poor and the foolhardy.

We ourselves aren't all that concerned.  Father Anonymous grew up in a moderately cold climate, and is certainly no stranger to zero-F temperatures.  Wear layers, stay active, or stay inside by the fire.  Sadly, attendance at the Epiphany service looks to be very small, but ... well, that would probably be true on a balmier night than this.  (Hora novissima, tempora pessissima sunt, as Bernard of Morlaix so memorably put it.)

In any case, that's not what we came here to say this morning.  No, we just wanted to point out that Polar Vortex would be a great super-villain name.  Batman has Mister Freeze, the Flash has Captain Cold -- why shouldn't Green Lantern or, better yet, one of the faux Silver Age characters in Kurt Busiek's brilliant pastiche Astro City match wits with an ice-themed villain named Polar Vortex?

Oh, and one more thing.  If you could only send back one Canadian import, would it be the polar vortex -- or Ted Cruz?

Hi-Yo, Silver ... Huh?

Like most boys over the last eight decades, Father Anonymous used to put on a black mask and a cowboy hat, pretending to be the Lone Ranger.  Antiquarian even as a tyke, Fr. A. grew up listening to the radio programs, reading and collecting the Fran Striker novels, watching (when he could) reruns of the Clayton Moore/Jay Silverheels television program, dreaming of silver bullets and cities of gold.  At one point, he owned a fairly detailed Lone Ranger action figure, and forced his kid brother to settle for Tonto.  (Such are the myriad privileges of primogeniture.)

It seems unlikely, after the release of the current Johnny Depp/Gore Verbinski film, that another generation of American boys will grow up this way.

The movie, which we saw last week, has been one of the worst-reviewed films of recent memory. A glance at Rotten Tomatoes turns up the words "bipolar" and  "schizophrenic."  It is too vulgar for kids, too silly for adults. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers is quoted as saying, "Your expectations of how bad The Lone Ranger is can't trump the reality."

They're not wrong.  But there's more to the story.  

We ourselves spent quite a bit of time squirming in our seat, wishing it were 1969 again.  That was the year of the last truly great Western movies:  Butch Cassidy, True Grit, The Wild Bunch.  There have certainly been some worthwhile outings since then, from The Shootist to Pale Rider.  But the genre has had a hard time figuring out where to go next.  From the comic deconstruction of Blazing Saddles to the pseudo-feminist exploitation of Bad Girls, Hollywood has thrashed about, trying to re-imagine the Western for modern times, and usually failing.

The Lone Ranger, of course, is not just a Western, but part of the very small subgenre of Western-themed superhero movies.  This is not an impossible nut to crack; the Zorro films are great fun.  And yet previous Lone Ranger reboots, in 1981 and (on television) 2003, have flopped badly.  (Not to mention the Dunwichian horror that was The Wild Wild West.) 

So Verbinski must have come into this project knowing that the odds were against him.  The obvious play would be to attempt conventional buddy picture -- Lethal Weapon in Monument Valley.  It might have worked, but then again it might have bored us all to tears. (The 1980s were so long ago!)  Pure parody might have worked, but he was never going to top Mel Brooks, so why bother?  

Playing it more or less straight -- trying to bring a Dark Knight sensibility to the project -- might have seemed logical, and is what we would have tried if it had been us.  But even there, the chances were slim.  In many ways, the Lone Ranger is more of a "comic book" character than Batman, in the most derogatory sense of that word.  Before Christopher Nolan came along, the Batman's abnormal psychology had been explored by Denny O'Neil, Doug Moench, Frank Miller and Tim Burton (and even, in a few truly strange 1940s stories, by Bill Finger himself).  In contrast, the Lone Ranger has always, always been portrayed as the straightest of straight men, the sort of character who shoots bad guys but magically never even injures them, and probably flosses his teeth each night by the campfire.  Pulling him into Nolan-land would have been a big jump.

So, faced with these unappealing choices, Verbinski went in another direction entirely.  He re-imagined The Lone Ranger as a surreal mystical adventure, a weird combination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Luis Bunuel.  This movie is not merely distinguished by its repetitive and CGI-heavy railroad battles, which bear a strong family resemblance to those in the recent Sherlock Holmes pictures, but by a horse that climbs trees and a pack of savage carnivorous rabbits.

Yes, the Ranger is a spirit-warrior, and Tonto his shamanic guide, and Silver not a horse so much as a supernatural manifestation.  Or, perhaps, the whole thing is a mischievous fable, told by an old man to a credulous boy. And maybe, just maybe, Armie Hammer's weird resemblance to George W. Bush is intended to set up some sort of political allegory. It's hard to tell.  By the end, you barely care.  You just ride along, laughing and shaking your head and waiting for the next trick to be pulled out of the magician's hat.

And by George, it's actually kind of fun.

That's the thing about Verbinski's Lone Ranger:  is is indeed a terrible movie, if you judge it by the standards of other Westerns, or superhero films, or action movies.  The only movie it really resembles, in our experience, is Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge -- a feast of deeply surreal excess, only nominally connected to its ostensible source material.  Both movies may both be enjoyed best while under the influence of mild hallucinogens -- and both movies may render such drugs superfluous.

 

The Dark Triad Speaks Out

Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, has a compelling chapter on the so-called "Dark Triad," consisting of clinical narcissists, Machiavellians and sociopaths.  These are people so constructed that, although they may have "cognitive empathy" -- a great sense of how somebody else ticks -- lack the sort of emotional empathy that results in compassion.   They can be dangerous and destructive people, but they can also be brilliant debaters and even inspiring leaders.

Attorney, professor and author M.E. Thomas is, by her own confession, "a diagnosed sociopath."*  Indeed, she has begun carving out a little niche as the nation's public sociopath, creating a blog devoted to the subject, writing a book and most recently an article in Psychology Today (May/June 2013; not online yet).

Thomas is all about mythbusting.  As she says, often, she's not a criminal.  Not because she is restrained from crime by any feelings of guilt or compassion, but because she understands that a safe, well-ordered world is one in which she can prosper.  The same is true of most sociopaths, who may constitute up to 4% of the population.  (On the other hand, they make of 20% of the prison population, and "are probably responsible for about half of all serious crimes," according to her PT article.)

She says, several times, that loves her family.  This seems natural enough, although it is difficult to imagine what "love" means to somebody whose life is lived without empathy, as a constant exercise in manipulation.  (Indeed, she tells a repulsive, Mean Girls-esque story of a man who was romantically interested in her, and how she used his interest to create havoc for another woman who was interested in him -- not for any particular reason, but because it amused her.  It is unnerving to think that somebody like that might be married, or have children.)

Most interesting to us, though, are Thomas's reflections upon her work and, yes, her faith.

Under the heading "Why Trial Law is a Sociopath's Fantasy," she writes:

My sociopathic traits make me a particularly excellent trial lawyer.  I'm cool under pressure. I feel no guilt or compunction, which is handy in such a dirty business.  Misdemeanour prosecutors almost always have to walk into a trial with cases they've never worked on before.  All you can do is bluff and hope that you'll be able to scramble through it.  The thing with sociopaths is that we are largely unaffected by fear.  Besides, the nature of the crime is of no moral concern to me; I am interested only in winning the legal game.

It it hardly surprising that some successful lawyers are dirty and amoral.  What does fascinate us is not only that Thomas has religious commitments, but that she is a Sunday School teacher:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a sociopath's dream.  Mormons believe that everyone has the potential to be godlike -- I believe this includes me.  Every being is capable of salvation; my actions are what matters, not my ruthless thoughts, not my nefarious motivations.  Everyone is a sinner, and I never felt that I was outside ths norm.

She then goes on to describe scamming and stealing from her classmates at Brigham Young University ( who were "even more trusting than the average Mormon"), and concludes:

But I am functionally a good person -- I bought a house for my closest friend, I gave my brother $10,000, and I am considered a helpful professor.  I love my family and friends.  Yet I am not motivated or constrained by the same things that most good people are.

Her story raises any number of theological questions, not least about differences between Mormonism and Christianity, the nature of "goodness," and the existence of natural law.  Beyond that, it is fascinating for its sheer strangeness.  Here we have the rare chance to glimpse into the mind of a person whose mind works very, very differently from most of ours -- and to be shaken by the sheer funhouse-mirror vision of an alternative humanity.  We wonder whether a sociopath could enjoy such an experience.

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*"Sociopath" is no longer a clinical diagnosis; it has disappeared into the category of "antisocial personality disorder."

Principia Phantasmatica

For what it's worth, we at the Egg believe in ghosts.  Not necessarily ectoplasmic ghoulies clanking chains, the existence of which seems improbable at best, but certainly in what the Bowen theory people call "spooks in the system," patterns of action and reaction that can carry over from one generation to another, shaping the lives of people who do not understand them, and which can only be driven out when they are identified clearly --  called, as it were, by name.  History, especially the history of a family or of an institution, is all about being haunted and exorcised.

Which brings us to Rebecca Stott's novel Ghostwalk.  We picked the book up a few months ago, and last week, while all hell was breaking loose nationwide, we read it -- taking advantage of an opportunity to immerse ourself in the alternate realities of geneticists and alchemists, Cambridge University, and Sir Isaac Newton's lifelong fascination with the color red.

As you might guess from the title, this is a ghost story.  A specter is haunting Cambridge, and a series of mysterious deaths in the 1660s seems connected to an ongoing series in the early 2000s.  An historian, writing a study of Newton's alchemical work, has drowned.  Her son, a research geneticist, hires his sometime lover to complete the book.  Meanwhile, the town is troubled by outbreaks of vandalism and violence that appear to be the work of an animal-rights group, which has made the geneticist its particular target.

It sounds complicated, but it isn't really.  The cast of characters is small, and the story is not hard to follow.  It takes her a while, but Stott manages to build some genuine suspense, as we try to discern what is real and what is unreal, and of real things, which are natural and which supernatural.

It would be easier to follow if the prose were less affected.  The narrator, Lydia Brook, speaks in the first person, addressing her lover Cameron Brown in the second; on a few occasions she drops into the third for no evident reason.  This is annoying enough.  She rambles a bit, indulges in unnecessarily florid descriptions and unimpressive bits of wordplay.  This is a first novel, and here is where it shows.  Nonetheless, the story is plotted well enough, and the characters are drawn sharply enough, to keep things from getting too boggy.

As for whether you like the story or not, it will depend (we imagine) on how you feel about ghost stories and/or about Newton.

Ghostwalk is part of a distinctive sub-genre, the so-called "antiquarian ghost story" associated with M.R. James -- himself a Cambridge don.  Stories like this generally involve academicians on holiday, doing some sort of ordinary historical research.  They are, by nature, full of dusty documents and obscure details about dead people, not infrequently accompanied by maps, footnotes and appendices.  Ghostwalk provides all of the above; better yet is the fact that the dead people are ones who really lived.  Needless to say, we at the Egg are the sort of people who like everything better with footnotes, up to and including our ice cream.

As for Newton, well, he was in his own lifetime, and remains to this day, one of the most celebrated of all Englishmen, "a national hero" as one of Stott's characters calls him.  This has made him an attractive character for deconstruction:  back in the 1960s, John Barth portrayed him as a pederast, Dan Brown put him in the Priory of Sion, and a Rob Cohen detective adventure movie is said to be in the works. (Of these, weirdly, Brown's version seems likeliest.)  A pioneer in mathematics and physics, and therefore one of the creators of what we mean today by "science," he was at the same time greatly preoccupied with things that we do not today consider scientific at all.  His interest in alchemy, perhaps under the influence of secret societies such as the Rosicrucians, has moved one historian to call him "the last sorcerer."  This is the heart of Stott's story.

And yet, strangely, she makes no mention of his other related interest, which was Christian theology.  Newton wrote a great deal of highly speculative (read:  heterodox) theology, dealing with Biblical hermeneutics and eschatology.  None of it was published in his lifetime, but modern scholars are well aware of it.  Since Stott is concerned with events of the 1650s and 60s, and Newton wrote his theological tracts after 1670, it is possible that she doesn't find them germane.  But it is hard to imagine that her characters, obsessed as they are with climbing into Newton's mind, would simply set this aside.

It is ironic that one of Stott's images for human relationships, whether those of separated lovers or of haunter and haunted, is quantum entanglement, "spooky action at a distance."  This idea comes not from Newtonian physics but from the quantum mechanics that partially supplanted it.  But of course science -- whether the science of light or of inheritance -- is not what Stott is trying to talk about.  neither, for that matter, is the dubious mixture of physics and metaphysics known as alchemy.  These are just metaphors for the interplay of love, ambition and rage that hold people together down through the years.

Ghostwalk is not for everybody.  But if you are interested Cambridge or Newton, and especially if you are interested in the past and how it haunts the present -- sometimes ruinously -- then this is worth a look.

Beware the Zombie Apocalypse!

It's not just for Canadians anymore.



Yes, this is a real campaign from the real Centers for Disease Control.  And yes, it is also going to be the theme of Father A.'s sermon come Sunday.

Because the time has come to take a stand against the living dead.

Hawaii is Sinking

Slowly.

Still, it's an interesting story.  Apparently, the mountains in Hawaii are dissolving faster than the rate of soil erosion.  The culprit, according to some BYU scientists, is groundwater.  It's the enemy within, the hydrogeological fifth column.

So although the mountains will continue to grow for something like a million and a half years, after that it's all downhill, literally.

We'd evacuate now.

Scientism

Do you remember when scientists were, as a class, inclined toward intellectual modesty, restricting their public statements to observations, and sometimes speculations, on the natural world which were supported by evidence or at the very least mathematics?  How, then, did some of them come to be treated, in a line which runs at least from Einstein to Dawkins, as experts on things foreign to their expertise -- ethics for the physicist, religion for the geneticist?

If time permits, please read this essay by biologist Austin L. Hughes, in The New Atlantis.  Hughes is concerned to critique "scientism," the idea that natural science is able to replace the traditional work of philosophers in epistemology and ethics.  Although he writes much of Dawkins and Sam Harris, his real concern seems to be with the positivist school of philosophy, which made and makes dubious claims for the power of science, often in ignorance of the scientific method or its results.

Hughes has read widely, and thought deeply about the overreach of his colleagues, as well as what he calls "the abdication of the philosophers." The essay is a gem; here are a few of our favorite bits.

Defending Popper's definition of "science" as a method characterized by falsifiable claims about the natural world, Hughes says:

We have seen in recent years a growing tendency to treat as “scientific” anything that scientists say or believe. The debates over stem cell research, for example, have often been described, both within the scientific community and in the mass media, as clashes between science and religion. It is true that many, but by no means all, of the most vocal defenders of embryonic stem cell research were scientists, and that many, but by no means all, of its most vocal opponents were religious. 

But in fact, there was little science being disputed: the central controversy was between two opposing views on a particular ethical dilemma, neither of which was inherently more scientific than the other. If we confine our definition of the scientific to the falsifiable, we clearly will not conclude that a particular ethical view is dictated by science just because it is the view of a substantial number of scientists. 

The same logic applies to the judgments of scientists on political, aesthetic, or other nonscientific issues. If a poll shows that a large majority of scientists prefers neutral colors in bathrooms, for example, it does not follow that this preference is “scientific.”

Arguing against another, quite circular, understanding of "science" as any enterprise supported by "scientific" institutions Hughes makes several excellent observations.  He reminds us that the studies supported by the Soviet institutions, for example, produced readily falsifiable results.  In response to the proposal that science is self-correcting, and that its progress, while spasmodic is is always forward, he suggests that his own decades of professional experience do not support this, and warns against overconfidence.  He sums up much of the problem thus:

The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. 

Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett [who propose this definition] explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families ... are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.” 

This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, "Why, I resemble that remark."  But in fact, Hughes is here suggesting the sobering possibility that some scientists -- a smallish number, to be sure -- have claimed for themselves a place as arbiters of truth and makers of policy which is not, in the modern world, even accorded to priests or kings.

Bang, Zoom!

To the moon, Alice!  To ... the ... moon!*

It seems that a Gingrich presidency was never the only pathway into space.  All along, sneaky old Barack Obama has been hiding a secret plan to send manned missions to the Moon.  Now that he's been re-elected, the rockets should start flying soon.**

According to Space.com, the President has asked NASA to prepare plans for exploration of "the expansive space around the Earth-Moon system."  This seems to mean parking a manned craft at the Lagrange point, visiting the Moon and then a near-earth asteroid -- all to get ready for the push to Mars.

Sadly, the timeline for this is a little longer than we might wish.  Think parking at L2 in 2015 or beyond, Mars in the 2030s.  Still, if they're looking for a geriatric chaplain ....

The best part of the story, though, is that these plans really were kept more-or-less secret during the campaign.  Apparently, the Republican candidate might have argued that this was a big government program.  Which it is -- the kind we like.
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*For the record, we can't watch the Honeymooners anymore, just because of this repeated threat of spousal violence.  How infected are we by the dread virus of liberal angst?
** Sorry, Pakistan.  We didn't mean those rockets.  Sore subject, right?

NASA is Our Hero

We at the Egg are often heard harrumphing about the fact that we do not yet have the personal jetpacks we were promised for the Year 2000.  We are still reeling from the GOP's shortsighted decision to choose a presidential candidate who might win over Newt Gingrich, who promised to flame out in a spectacular fashion -- but also promised to build us the damned lunar colony we've been waiting for since 1969.

But you know what?  Real science is cool too.  And although the fact that we now live in the era of commercial spaceflight, of Chinese space stations, and of a decommissioned space shuttle fleet may sometimes make NASA's glory days look like a thing of the past, it ain't necessarily so.

In a few hours -- 5:31 a.m. on Sunday, GMT, which is 1:31 a.m. in New York -- NASA will land the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.  If you haven't been following the story, this may sound ho-hum:  What, another robot buggy looking at rocks?  But there's so much more to it than that!  For one thing, this robot buggy is nuclear-powered truck.  For another, the thing is going to climb a 3-mile-high mountain.  And for a third, the new thinking is that Mars may have as much underground water as Earth does, which makes the search for evidence of life (and the prospect of colonization) a lot less impractical.  But the biggest thing, for us, is the landing itself.

Forget the airbags.  They're going to drop this sucker onto the surface using retro-rockets and a freaking space crane.  How's that for pushing the edge? (Here's a text description from iO9, our source for pretty much everything we know.)  

Here's a mock-up video.  It's 11 awe-inspiring minutes of what NASA hopes will happen:

Mind you, there's always room for error.  The distance is such that the landing can't be controlled by human beings; this is all going to be done on auto-pilot, and we won't even know if it has worked until a few minutes after the fact.  Some people at NASA describe the incredibly complex maneuver as "seven minutes of terror." Everybody knows that it may fail, which is -- of course -- one of the risks of exploration.

Today, we read (also at iO9) that they're even planning to film the landing from a second spacecraft, already in orbit.  It's an iffy proposition -- Curiosity will be hurtling toward Mars at hundreds of mph, the other craft is moving, the controllers are hundreds of millions of miles away.

But you know what?  Even if there are no pictures -- heck, even if there is no landing -- this is one of the most ambitious pieces of space exploration ever attempted.  The engineering skill involved is immense.  So, sure, SpaceX shot some cargo up, the Chinese managed to dock with their own station, and we need the Russians to give us a boost getting to ours.  But when any of those guys can build a 2000-pound nuclear robot truck, send it into space, then drop it with pinpoint accuracy into a crater on Mars using absolutely new technology, all the while taking pictures from your other orbital craft -- well, let them give us a call.  Until then, NASA is our hero.

Evangelical Atheist Medical Missionaries

There was Father A., his insides packed full of that foul fluid they make you drink, lying on the doctor's     couch in anxious anticipation of his first colonoscopy.  It wasn't a banner day by any means.  Nobody, we expect, relishes the idea of having a camera stuck up his tuchis.  Moreover, a failed sigmoidoscopy some years earlier, performed by a different physician, had been one of the memorably unpleasant medical procedures of Fr. A.'s adult life.

This promised to be a better day.  The environment was tranquil, the doctor seemed calm and undistracted, and -- best of all -- colonoscopies are performed upon fully narcotized patients, a fact which by itself made this day sunnier than that of the infamous Flexible Sig.  Fr. A. calmed his anxieties and tried not to think about the gallon of antifreeze distending his tummy.

Then the anaesthetist sat down, and introduced himself.  "I'm Dr. So-and-So," he said, flipping through the papers on a clipboard.  "And you're Mr. ... Anonymous ... and it says here that you're ... oh, look at this.  A member of the clergy?  Is that right?"

"Uh-huh."

"How interesting," Dr. So-and-So continued.  "I'm an atheist myself."

"Ah."

"I was raised Catholic," he said.  Or maybe Presbyterian, or Methodist; we don't remember, because we didn't care the least little bit.  Our attention was entirely taken up by thoughts of antifreeze and miniature cameras.  So far from prepared for a theological discussion were we then that we could likely not have distinguished between the variata and invariata, much less parsed a Greek verb.  Our god was, for the moment, quite literally in the belly.

So we responded to Dr. S&S's remarks with no more than the merest of polite grunts and murmurs, of the kind meant to show as little interest as possible.  The doctor continued, however, as though we had been rapt with fascination.

He had rejected Christianity, he said, because he was a man of Science; faith had no answers for him; the Scriptures seemed to contradict themselves; believers seemed to him like desperate children -- we're sure there was more but, as he performed his duty, we fell into the blessed respite of unconsciousness.

We awoke with a clear head and a clear intestine; both doctors had done admirable work.  But the memory lingered, of the anaesthetist offering his unsolicited arguments against religion -- witnessing, in evangelical jargon -- to an anxious and incapacitated patient.

This was not an isolated experience.  Not too long before, we had paid several visits to a cardiologist who did the same thing.  He was jolly and well-read and possibly a little bored with his work, but he was also very keen to make sure that we knew just how contemptible he found religion in all its forms, and how laughable he found a belief in God.

Mind you, we do not show up to the doctor's office in a cassock.  Not so much as a cross or WWJD bracelet (the initials, of course, for Wow-Wee it's John Donne).  We don't distribute tracts or recite the Angelus.  All we do is fill in the little space on the forms they give us.  And yet a surprising number of physicians, over the past few years, have seemed to feel that the moment of a medical procedure is just the right time to promote their opposition to Christianity.

It's not, if only for practical reasons -- patients have other things to think about, and wish that their doctors did as well.  The place for religious arguments, if there must be a place, is a cocktail party, or a lecture hall.  Or perhaps one's memoirs.  Or, if they wanted, they could team up with their fellow anti-religionists and spend Saturday ringing doorbells and passing out newsletters.  It seems to work for the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Still, this is a sign of the times.  We have reached a point in history when, like Christian missionaries in Africa handing out medicine along with their Bibles, atheist missionaries in America now witness to their unfaith as they distribute medicine.

Pinki Pramanik Goes Free

Indian athlete Pinki Pramanik has been released from jail, essentially because she lacks a penis.

The story, which has unfolded over the past few months, is complicated.  Pramanik's live-in lover, a woman, has accused her both of being a man and of committing rape.  She was arrested and allegedly groped by policemen.  She has been subjected to a number of inconclusive medical examinations -- one of which became a viral internet video.  Her treatment by the authorities has become a cause celebre among both fans and advocates for human rights.   Although the chromosome-test results have not yet come in, a judge has now ruled that, although Pramanik's genitalia are "abnormal," she lacks the "male organ" necessary to commit rape as it is defined under Indian law.

Superficially, of course, this may be confusing -- and it is made more so by a certain coyness in the press reports.  Many readers are still accustomed to thinking of maleness and femaleness as straightforward things, easily confirmed by a quick dropping of trousers.  But it seems that Pramanik is what people these days call intersex, meaning that her body doesn't conform to the simple a-or-b format.

This case opens windows onto several different areas in which the acknowledgment that intersex people exist has begun to challenge prevalent customs in society, law and, particularly, sports.

For example, is a "male organ" strictly necessary to commit rape?  What about an inanimate object, of the kind employed in a decidedly loving and non-violent manner by many couples?  (One doubts that Boys Don't Cry was a big hit in India, or that the judge has seen it.)  What, when you come right down to it, constitutes rape?  In this case, the judge ruled that, because the complainant had lived with Pramanik for three years, she had effectively consented to ... whatever happened.  Such a ruling would not withstand scrutiny under most contemporary American laws.

Then there is the question of how the police treat prisoners, and especially prisoners accused of sexual crimes -- and most especially, prisoners who don't conform to the customary sex and gender roles.  To begin with, where are they housed, in jails made to accommodate either men or women?  But beyond that, how are they handled, physically and otherwise?  Pramanik's repeated humiliation reminds us of the way the police routinely violated the rights and dignity of gay people prior to Stonewall (and in many places, long afterward).

And of course, there is the matter of sports.  Most athletic competition is segregated by sex; to do otherwise would give men an enormous advantage, if only by virtue of muscle mass.  Similar logic informs anti-doping rules, of course.  Less well-known is that international authorities also regulate the naturally occurring hormone level of female athletes.  Women who don't conform to the "standard" profile are required to undergo surgery and/or hormone treatments.  Such is the case, for example, of South African runner Caster Semenya, who has female genitalia but, instead of a uterus, was born with undescended testes which, according the The New Yorker, provide her with "three times the amount of testosterone present in the average female."

The more one looks at it, the more complicated it gets.  Is a person's sex determined by external genitalia, by internal organs, by chromosomes or by hormone levels?  Does "sex" even exist upon close inspection, or is it really -- as transgendered writer (and ex-Scientologist) Kate Bornstein says -- all just "gender," a sort of mutually-agreed-upon convention, like grammar?

Meanwhile, Pinki Pramanik's trials have not ended.  The days she was released from jail, the government also brought new accusations against her, having to do with an alleged illegal land deal.  Legitimate charges or continued harassment?  Like so much else, it's hard to tell at a glance.

The Infidel Particle

The Higgs boson, long predicted, seems to have been identified by experiment.  This is enormous news in the world of physics, since it validates the so-called Standard Model of the universe.  The press loves it, because of the name inadvertently given to the thing by a Leon Lederman, when editors rejected the original title proposed for his book, which would have been "The Goddamned Particle."

As an aside, we note the different situations in two neighboring nations, each with a partial claim to Higgs-related glory.

The word "boson" was coined by Paul Dirac, giving credit to the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), who worked with Einstein and directed the physics program at Dacca University.  The Indian press (here, here, here) has been eager to make sure that we all know this, and just a bit miffed that this Higgs fellow is getting all the press.

Mind you, a Pakistani physicist also deserves some credit, which his homeland prefers to deny him.  Abdus Salam (1926-1996) was one of the two physicists who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, and shared his Nobel prize with Steven Weinberg, the other.  He was an important figure in Pakistani science and government until 1974, when his religious community, the Ahmadi sect, was declared to be heretical, and subjected to intense persecution.  Salam left Pakistan, and could not return safely.  Even after his body was returned for burial, the tombstone -- reading "First Muslim Nobel Laureate" -- was defaced.

Please do note the difference between life, culture and religion in the world's largest democracy, which wants to make sure that one of its heroes gets a place in the world's textbooks, and Pakistan, which has literally had one stricken from its own.

Space Nazis!

We saw Iron Sky last night.  Capsule review:

• SFX way beyond its tight budget;
• No Producers, but still ... a funny movie about Nazis;
• Slightly hamfisted political satire; 
• Marry me, Renate Richter!

For a more thoughtful take, see the parish soapbox.

We're Voting for Newt!

Even typing those words sent a little shiver of guilt-cum-nausea through our body. (Or maybe that was the fish we ate last night. Mmmm -- perch with hazelnuts. But we digress.)

Anyway, Gingrich has promised that, if elected, he would create a permanent inhabited base on the moon. At first glance, and in the present economic climate, that seems shockingly unlikely. On second glance, it looks like a prime target for cries of "Big government run amok," especially within Newt's own party. And on third glance, it looks like just another campaign promise, easily made and easily broken. (Like Gingrich's wedding vows, areweright?)

(And, incidentally, the WaPo description of this discussion sounds like a cleaned-up version of the "presidents on the Titanic" joke: Gingrich claims 1930s science fiction is a Big Idea; Romney says that if an employee brought him this plan, he'd fire him; Paul says the people he'd send to the moon are politicians. Seriously, these guys should do vaudeville.)

Sure, it sounds a little ridiculous. But ... but ... darn it, we want a moonbase.

When we were little tykes, they told us that by The Year 2000, we would have personal jetpacks, commuter flights to Moonbase Alpha, and a pony. (Yeah -- a cloned robot pony.) Needless to say, we waited patiently but expectantly, and needless to say the past eleven years have been a grave disappointment.

Still, we soldier on into the future, only a trembling upper lip revealing the wounded little boy inside us. The Internet and big-budget superhero movies are nice, but they're no jetpacks. And nothing, nothing, can replace a colony on the moon.

So Gingrich says we should have one. That makes him, by a cruel twist of fate, our preferred candidate for the Presidency of these United States. Nor are we alone; the bastion of corporate geekery, i09, has a list of 181 reasons Newt is right ... about the moon. Needless to say, the man is wrong about every other subject on which he has ever offered an opinion, including the time of day and which direction is up.

Mind you, if Newtie No Beauty manages to win the nomination, and then the general election, and yet there is no moonbase within some reasonable period of time -- six weeks should be adequate; we've had 32 years to get ready -- there will be grave repercussions. Like we'll call him even worse names than we already do. How do you like that, Newt in a Suit? Er ... we'll come up with better ones by then -- promise.

If PIPA Passes

That's a literary (and geographical) allusion, but good luck finding out to what. After all, Wikipedia is shut down for the day. In English, that is; the Latin and Finnish sites are still working, for what that's worth to the morally-challenged students at third-tier universities all over America.

The bigger concerns are the laws to which this blackout has drawn fresh attention. We're not entirely up to speed on this, so we won't say much. Here's a quick rundown from Gizmodo, and a better one from Wired. Here's a very watchable 13-minute rant by TED's Clay Shirky.

We will say this: America's intellectual property laws are already strict enough to stifle innovation. Copyright and patent laws have been strengthened and, in particular, their terms have been lengthened. Rather than benefiting the actual scientists or artists who make new things, the laws now provide a startling benefit to corporations -- and almost in perpetuity.

These laws do stimulate one kind of innovation, but it's a bad one. They have created the entire industry of patent warehousing, in which big companies buy up patents for things they didn't invent and have never produced, for the sole purpose of suing some other companies that eventually invent and build something similar. Suing them, and then essentially stealing their profits. The website paidContent.org describes it as "a protection racket in which an entire industry has to decide whether or not to pay a licensing fee up front or fight off litigation in court."

Add to this the unnecessarily high cost of pharmaceuticals, which contributes (a little) to the outrageous surge in health-care costs, and you begin to see the creepy moral questions which hunker around the margins of IP law.

But back up. So far as we can tell, the laws presently before Congress have nothing to do with patents, and therefore with drugs. They are designed to protect two industries: recording and film.

Protecting these industries is like declaring dinosaurs an endangered species. Except that the dinosaurs were bloodthirsty killers, not cocaine-addled moral degenerates. It took a planet-sized meteor to kill the dinosaurs; the recording industry has been kept alive by Congressional favoritism since the 1990s.

Recording, in particular, was a perverse blip, which for the first time in history allowed musicians to become wealthy for something besides writing and performing music; it made the sleazy middlemen even wealthier, and they built that wealth up by deceiving and defrauding the actual artists. Record producers were parasites, living off people with actual talent and depending completely upon the existence of the copy-proof vinyl LP. Protecting these guys is an idea so bad it makes bailing out Detroit look like probity personified. Their industry is dying; it deserves to die; let it die.

The irony here is that, although we at the Egg lack even the minimal tech savvy required to file-share or otherwise download protected content, we live in a country where it is rampant. Where the customary fashion accessory for Eastern Europeans was once an anarchist newspaper tucked under one's overcoat, it is now a terrabyte external drive containing ten movies, a season or two of HBO, and more music than J.S. Bach listened to in his entire lifetime.

This sounds like an argument for stronger laws, right? After all, these people are pirates. But do you know why they are pirates? Because nobody will sell the stuff to them. Try to use Netflix, Hulu, any of the legitimate vendors, and they send you a polite note saying "We are sorry, but we are unable to distribute content to your country." PBS Kids won't let Preschooler A. watch clips from his favorite programs about talking teddy bears.

Now, not everybody we know would pay for the stuff, even if they got the chance. But some of us would, and the media companies would make a few bucks they aren't making now. And they wouldn't lose a cent.

Or, to paraphrase our friends at the NRA: When it becomes a crime to download content, only criminals will download content.

The Future of Wine

Wine is doomed! Global warming has imperiled the international wine industry. By the end of the century -- and maybe much sooner -- the fabled wines of France, Italy and Iberia will be little more than a memory.

Or, on second thought, maybe not. At the moment, high-quality wine grapes are growing in places like Britain, where they have not grown since the later Middle Ages. At the same time, there is no evidence that the flavors of the great European vintages (or Napa Valley) have been affected. In other words, there is more good wine in circulation than ever before; we are living in the golden age of viticulture.

These are the competing conclusions drawn by John McQuaid, in an article posted at Yale's environment360. In an age of sound bites and over-the-top alarmism, it may seem mealy-mouthed on McQuaid's part to resist confidently projecting a single scenario, whether of doom or of comfort. It took us a moment to remember that serious journalism, like any other sort of serious fact-based discussion, used to routinely resist following after Chicken Little. What a strange place the past is, even for those of us who have been there!

Anyway, the article is interesting for anybody who cares about wine. And why shouldn't we? After all, it is a sacrament.

Note to self: stock up on tawny port. Just in case.

Octopi Wall Street!

That was one i09 reader's comment on this astonishing piece of video:

Yes, that's right: a walking octopus. An octopus that hauls its gelatinous body out of the water, crawls across the land, drops a crab off with some onlookers (at 2:08), and then flops back into the drink.

We knew they were clever creatures, easily the smartest of the invertebrates -- apart from an occasional bishop -- but we had no idea they could walk. Frankly, we find the idea disturbing.

A couple of other i09 readers made Cthulhu jokes, which were inevitable, but another told an absolutely freaky story about a science teacher who thought kids were stealing fish from his tanks. So he set up a camera, which filmed the nocturnal shenanigans of an octopus. This monster of the deep was able to squeeze itself through a quarter-sized hole, crawl along a counter, climb into another tank, eat a resident, and then escape back the way it had come -- covering its tracks.

We at the Egg, for one, welcome our cephalopod overlords.

Dept. of No Surprise: Sewage is Icky

Per Science Daily, scientists have found a "surprising number of viruses in sewage." More astonishing yet, some of these viruses "could relate to human health." We know -- astonishing, right?

As it happens, the climax to our very favorite movie occurs in a sewer. Orson Welles is the villain, his veneer of charm torn away to reveal the vicious, treacherous s.o.b. underneath. He is chased through the bowels of Vienna by the police and even by his childhood friend Joseph Cotton. Wounded, he tries to escape, crawling up a staircase and reaching his fingers up through the grating. He doesn't make it. It is a dramatic moment, and one which is not without theological weight. (Screenplay by Graham Greene, remember).

But here's the thing, and it's something old Fr. A. thinks about every time he watches the picture. If the bullet hadn't killed old Orson, do you think the viruses would have?