Science

A new technique that uses soundwaves to separate materials for recycling could help prevent potentially harmful chemicals leaching into the environment.

Researchers have developed AI technology that can detect patterns in gut bacteria to identify complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) with remarkable accuracy, potentially transforming how CRPS is diagnosed and treated.

Astronomers have probed the physical environment of repeating X-ray outbursts near monster black holes thanks to data from NASA's NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) and other missions.

Researchers recently connected their campuses with an experimental quantum communications network using two optical fibers.

Researchers recently connected their campuses with an experimental quantum communications network using two optical fibers.

Recent artificial intelligence advances have largely focused on text, but AI increasingly shows promise in other contexts, including manufacturing and the service industry. In these sectors, targeted AI improvements can improve product quality and worker safety, according to a new study.

Recent artificial intelligence advances have largely focused on text, but AI increasingly shows promise in other contexts, including manufacturing and the service industry. In these sectors, targeted AI improvements can improve product quality and worker safety, according to a new study.

Researchers captured sound fields around musical triangles. They wanted to understand the physical properties of the triangle instrument, test assumptions about the contribution of the triangle shape, and capture clear documentation through pictures of the sound waves around the triangle. Using acousto-optic imaging to study detailed characteristics of sound vibration pattern, the team found results that suggest resonance may occur in the triangle's semi-open space.

Researchers model the motions of groups of manta rays to study how group dynamics affect their propulsion, studying different formations of three manta rays: in tandem, in a triangular setup with one manta ray in front leading two behind, and in an inverse triangular configuration with one manta ray trailing the other two. They found the tandem formation only significantly increases propulsion for the middle manta ray, and the two triangular setups result in overall decreased efficiency compared to a single swimmer on its own. These findings can help optimize formations for underwater vehicle operations.

In the quest toward finding the correct theory of quantum gravity, physicists have been testing the holographic principle which, they say, is a key property of any valid theory of quantum gravity.

In the quest toward finding the correct theory of quantum gravity, physicists have been testing the holographic principle which, they say, is a key property of any valid theory of quantum gravity.

Scientists have found a new way to produce sugar from corn stalks and other crop waste, potentially opening a new pathway to sustainable biofuels.

As the search for geologic hydrogen - a potential clean source of energy beneath the ground - continues, some researchers are turning to mountains

An adaptation of cognitive behavioural therapy that focuses on mindfulness and tolerating distress has shown promise for relieving chronic pain

25 years ago, a $1 million reward was promised to anyone who could solve one of seven incredibly hard maths riddles. With only one of them now solved, what will it take to crack the rest?

The JWST continues to live up to its promise by revealing things hidden from other telescopes. One of its lesser-known observations concerns Free-Floating Planets (FFP). FFPs have no gravitational tether to any star and are difficult to detect because they emit so little light. When the JWST detected 42 of a particular type of FFP in the Orion Nebula Cluster, it gave astronomers an opportunity to study them more closely.

I’ve never read or listened to Ezra Klein, who does podcasts and columns at the NYT and elsewhere, but the impression I got from others was that he was wickedly smart.  I don’t listen to podcasts, his main metier, so I didn’t know. I have to say, though, that I’m not that impressed by the views he expresses in this 1.5-hour interview (bottom) with Ross Douthat, also of the NYT.

Douthat has been pushing his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, all over the place, including in the NYT and the Free Press . I’ve discussed some of his theses before on this site (see here), and, as you might imagine, I haven’t been a fan. Not only does he say that everyone has a longing for religion to fill their “god-shaped hole,” but he says that Roman Catholicism, which (not coincidentally) is his own religion, is the right faith—the way to a happy afterlife. And Douthat’s bought pretty much the whole Vatican hog, including the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels. I was surprised to see that, released on Feb. 11, the book is only at Amazon position 2,825 this morning; I thought that—given his claim that Americans are longing for faith—his written lucubrations would be in the top 100 at least, since I’ve never seen a book promotion so relentless in the MSM.

But I digress. In the video below, Douthat and Klein, both eloquent and clearly smart people, make a great deal of the unevidenced: the things that science and “materialism” can’t explain and, therefore, constitute for both men evidence for either God or “something beyond materialism.” And I have to say that I was terrifically bored, but don’t let my reaction put you off.

Here are the YouTube notes by Klein with the timings of relevant parts.

I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.

My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike. [JAC: I didn’t!]

Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty?

And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

The segments of the video (click to go to them):

0:00 Intro
1:11 Trump: man of destiny?
19:55 Political power, cruelty and Godliness
36:25 Religion and spirituality in the modern world
43:18 The mysteries of the universe…
49:31 Aliens! Fairies! (and some Catholic history)
58:25 Contending with uncertainty and evil
1:07:02 Psychedelic experiences
1:23:36 Official knowledge
1:36:02 Book recommendations

The NYT has a written transcript here (archived here). I did not read it exept to check the quotes, so my reactions below are based on listening.

I started listening 36 minutes in. after the politics were over, and Ceiling Cat help me, I made it to the end, but still required a stiff dose of Pepto-Bismol afterwards. But perhaps you want to listen to the politics, too.

So here’s the evidence that Douthat takes for the existence of the Christian (and Catholic) god. I’ll make no attempt to be cohesive here; I’ll just give my thoughts, Douthat’s and Klein’s assertions, and some quotes.

First, I was greatly disappointed to see Klein (who appears to be a slightly religious Jew susceptible to the “supernatural”) not pushing back on some of Douthat’s more extreme claims, including the existence of Jesus and an omnipotent loving God, of course, but also of angels and demons (he mentions the efficacy of exorcism), saints, life after death, and even trickster beings (“fairies”). Douthat’s primary evidence for God is the existence of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, which, he avers, have considerable overlap between different faiths. In other words, he bases the existence of his religion—and his being—on what people feel. To him that’s as strong, or even stronger, evidence than scientific evidence and materialism. But it’s nothing new. It’s popular now because it’s being pushed by the press as an “important” book.

In fact, Douthat and Klein both reject materialism, largely because it can’t explain these experiences and consciousness, as well as the existence of a world that, Douthat asserts, was “created with us in mind.” It makes me wonder why God created all those other lifeless planets. Is it for our amusement or wonder? And if there is life on some planets, was that also created by God, and did the aliens experience visitations by Jesus?

As Douthat says, “a new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity, in its unruliness, in the experiences people have, in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe”. . . and then mentions quant-mechanical entanglement and the many-worlds hypothesis as a speculations beyond materialism that makes his faith in God stronger. I don’t think a physicist would find these either non-materialistic or evidence for the divine. As in everything that both men espouse in this show, our failure to understand something gets figured into Douthat’s Bayesian statistic that raises the probability of God’s existence.

For Klein, the unexplainable experiences can be spiritual ones as well as religious ones. But Klein leaves no doubt that religious and spiritual explanations, as well as other phenomena that science doesn’t (yet) understand, are supernatural explanations, and “supernatural” means “nonmaterialistic.”

Douthat:

I mean the view that all of existence — life, the universe and everything — is finely reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary, rather than the other way around. I don’t mean materialism in terms of Madonna’s “Material Girl” or something like that — although the two can be connected.

He clearly thinks it’s the other way around (i.e. mind isn’t material), and firmly rejects the view—Klein seems to agree—that consciousness and the mind are nonmaterial phenomena that give Douthat evidence for God and Klein evidence for the supernatural. Douthat, it seems, is apparently unaware of the advances that science has made showing that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon (for one thing, you can predictably remove it with anesthesia and then restore it).

Now to be fair, Klein, who apparently has tried drugs like ayahuasca, notes that predictable effects on the mind can also be effected by psychedelic substances, Douthat rejects this materialism, claiming that religious experiences are very different from psychedelic ones (having taken psychedelic drugs in the past, I have strong doubts about this, though I haven’t experienced Jesus). And, to further counteract this, Douthat argues that the religious experiences of all religions are pretty much the same.  As I recall from reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, this isn’t true, even for Western religion. I wonder, for example, if the religious experiences of a Buddhist monk living his whole life in a cave are the same as those of a Christian talking to Jesus. The only common factor is something beyond the worldly.

Giving a sop to other religions—though Douthat thinks that Roman Catholicism is the “right” one (and by that he clearly means you don’t go to heaven if you embrace the wrong one, don’t confess, don’t take communion, and the like)—he does say that all religions have a core set of “truths” that are pretty much the same. I doubt it.  Hard-core Muslims not only reject the divinity of Jesus or the necessity of believing in the tripartite God if you want to live in Paradise after death. And the morality of faiths is very different. If you’re an apostate Muslim, you should be killed, and you have to pray five times a day.  (I haven’t mentioned the cargo cults, which to me qualify as religions, too.)

Further evidence that Douthat adduces for God are the fact that the universe seems “fine tuned” for life (I won’t go into the many alternative explanations), and that a broken radio started playing spontaneously at Michael Shermer’s wedding with no materialistic explanation (I kid you not; read the transcript).

Now Douthat’s Achilles’s heel, which Klein mentions, is the existence of natural evil: childhood cancers, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like—things that kill innocent people for no obvious reason. These don’t evince an omnipotent or omniscient God. Why do they happen?

Douthat says we don’t know:

I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved.

I’m not here to tell you I’ve resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It’s a real issue. Again, I think it’s an issue that’s there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testaments.

So, although he hasn’t resolved this HUGE problem, Douthat is confident that it’s part of God’s plan. (What an evil God it must be to give children leukemia!).  Yet I see no difference between his view one one hand and his denigration of science for having confidence  that materialism will someday resolve the problem of consciousness on the other.  After all, science is making progress on consciousnes, but has made no progress in understanding the existence of natural evil. And it never will, for all we have are smart people like Douthat, and a coterie of theologians, who get paid to simply ruminate on the problem but, in the end, can make no progress. How can your mind tell you why God permits natural evil? Through a revelation?

And I’d like to ask Douthat this: “If the Chcristian God says that we can get to heaven only by believing in him (and going “through Jesus”), why doesn’t God make his presence more clearly?  He could, you know, and then everyone would have the “right” religion!”  And here I don’t mean “religious experiences,” but a physical manifestation that could be documented to such an extent that it can’t be doubted. (I give an example of this scenario in Faith Verus Fact.) God surely wants everyone to go to heaven, for he’s a good God, so why didn’t he show up in first-century Palestine. What happens to all those Egyptians and Babylonians?

At the end, Klein asks Douthat to recommend three books for the audience. Here they are:

Stephen Barr, “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”

After” by Bruce Greyson (about the afterlife)

“Mind and Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel

Of these I’ve read only Nagel’s book, which is teleological without being religious and somewhat confused. You can find several critiques of the books by Big Minds online.

There are two big problems with this discussion. The first is Douthat’s uncritical embrace of Roman Catholicism and all its doctrine. And the mask slips a bit when he says this:

I don’t know what your metaphysical perspectives were as a kid. But I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.

I just think it’s, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that’s not inherently comforting. It’s quite terrifying.

Well, what is comforting–or discomforting–need not be true.  But since neither Douthat nor Klein is a materialist, there is very little discussion about the evidence for Jesus, God, Satan, angels, demons, and so on. They are taken as a given, presumably evidenced through revelation or experience.

And that brings us to the second problem. Though Klein and Douthat are buddies, Klein does not push him hard on his views. It’s more a spiritual bro-fest than a discussion, which is perhaps why I found it so tedious. Douthat is making a name for himself even though he spouts the same old pieties (worse–he buys the whole Vatican hog)

Here are some quotes from a reader who called this to my attention.

Ezra Klein interviewing Ross Douthat. Klein hardly endears himself to rationality. But Douthat is talking about the reality of angels, demons, fairies, and that Christianity and Judaism being divinely founded – poor Buddhists left out… The NYTimes gives Douthat uncritical time. Shame on them for giving him prominence in the paper of record.

. . .Perhaps I am being harsh and insensitive to their friendship. But Klein’s failure to challenge RD’s belief in demons, angels, fairies, etc saddened me. Hence my “Klein hardly endears himself to rationality” comment.

If there is a religious revival going on, the juggernaut is being pushed by the mainstream media. I have no idea why save for the tiny flattening of the curve showing the proportion of “nones” over the last two years.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.

Graphene is a 'miracle material': mechanically extremely strong and electrically highly conductive, ideal for related applications. Using a unique method physicists have now made graphene drastically more stretchable by rippling it like an accordion. This paves the way for new applications in which certain stretchability is required (e.g. wearable electronics).