Thursday, February 27, 2014

Religious Rights


The recent skirmishes over a bill in Arizona that would allow business owners to discriminate by refusing to serve certain people of their own choosing were defended by the claim that "religious rights" were involved. But Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the bill and that produced even more screaming that religious rights were being violated. "Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer makes Christians in her state second class citizens," tweeted one person. It's interesting that in this person's mind it is only Christians who are being deprived of their rights. Is it really only Christians who want this bill so that they can refuse to serve Gay and Lesbian couples? It's interesting how something that is proposed and defended on the basis of broad rights nevertheless comes down to just one thing, hatred of the LGBT world.

What interests me in all of this is the way Christians evidently feel threatened and how the concept of "religious rights" is used. The First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The first part of this sentence means that in the eyes of our government Christians have no more clout than any other religious or non-religious group. For to elevate Christians above Muslims, for instance, would be to establish a state authorized religion. The thorny part is the second half of the sentence, providing that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Does this mean that members of any religious group can do anything they wish so long as it is defended as an authorized "practice" of that religion? Hence, should American Muslims be allowed to follow all practices of Sharia Law? Should conservative Mormons be allowed to have numerous wives, many of them under age? Obviously, we are not ready to embrace every "practice" that comes along.

What we need to think through is what it means to "practice or exercise a religion." Catholics are counseled to shun birth control measures and to have as many children as possible. The exercise of Catholicism evidently means ignoring birth control when it comes to one's personal behavior. But does this give Catholics the right to disapprove of non-Catholics who want to behave otherwise? And how far can they go with their disapproval? It seems clear to me that the free exercise of a religion is the freedom to think in certain ways, to join with others of a similar faith, and to regulate one's own behavior in accordance. But everyone must remember that the very same right to religious freedom is held by every other person, which includes the right to be completely non-religious as well. So there must be an "edge" to personal behavior beyond which the practice of one's religious beliefs is no longer appropriate. This is because going beyond that edge begins to imply that all others must practice the same religious beliefs as you do. Interestingly, the First Amendment has a tricky side. If the Constitution in saying that free exercise of religion cannot be prohibited were to mean that any religious group can require others to conform to its standard of behavior, that would actually constitute an infraction of the first part of the amendment, that Congress shall not establish any religion. So clearly the First Amendment does not grant the free exercise of religion in any sense that allows religious groups to require their preferred behaviors of others. 

Now in the Arizona law the issue is whether a Christian business owner can refuse to do business with someone who behaves in a non-Christian way. The question is whether running a business is an authorized part of a Christian practice. Or, in running a business, does a person leave the free exercise of his/her religion behind and, instead, commit to working with people of any belief as guaranteed them by the Constitution. The answer seems obvious to me.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Is There Really a Science vs. Religion Debate?


Very recently there was a staged debate between Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Ken Ham, the Genesis Guy (founder of the Creation Museum). The question posed was the limited question of the earth's history --- the Bible's version of a 6000-year history vs. Evolution's version of millions of years. Ham suggested that there are really several "sciences" and that his "Historical Science" based on the Bible deserves as much respect as so-called "Observational Science" favored by Nye. Ham claims that his Historical Science "works at least as well" as Observational Science. It is very interesting that Ham put it this way because his claim follows straight down the avenues of American Pragmatism, especially the version popularized by William James. Meaning and truth follow because something works for us. 

What concerns me is what it is, in Ham's mind, that works for him and his followers. I will illustrate, below, something the works pretty well for observational science. 

The general idea that trees have rings of annual growth works for us because we can cut a cross section from a tree and both show and count the rings. We can also demonstrate that rings increase in size or decrease in size in concert with the annual amount of precipitation. This gives the pattern of rings a unique "finger print" belonging to the weather history in the area where the tree grew. This works for us because we can compare trees that grew in the same region and whose histories are known. If one tree was cut down years earlier than another, we can still match the finger prints for the years that they overlapped. In this way, scientists have been able to map trees backward in time, producing a weather history through ring patterns. The bristlecone pines of the White Mountains are of special interest here because they are very slow growing and very old. Dendrochronologists have reconstructed ring sequences that go back 10,000 years and several living trees are on record as being very old indeed --- a 5,000 year old bristle cone pine and a 9,550 year old Norway spruce in Sweden. Dendrochronology also works for us as a comparison to radio-carbon dating for similar time periods. The two procedures compare very well; that is, they reinforce each others results. 

This is what observational scientists mean when they say that science works for them. Not only can we show things to one another but we can write about our observations in journals which can be read by others around the world (no matter what their religious beliefs are) and they can make similar observations of their own. The scientific community is a world community that shares observation of the natural world. It does not depend upon any particular object of reverence or a religious icon. 

What Mr. Ham needs to do now is to actually tell us what it is that works for him in his historical vision guided by the Bible. One of the first things we can say is that Ham's community is not a world community but only a segment of the Christian community. Furthermore, it seems to me that what works for this community is a kind of self-satisfied commitment of faith to a particular religious icon.

I want to go back to the title of this blog --- Is there really a religion vs. science debate? I don't want to put down the self-satisfaction of Ham's Christian community and I don't particularly want to elevate the satisfactions of observational scientists like dendrochronologists. What seems obvious to me, in fact, is that there is no debate and there is no possibility of a debate because there is no common ground. Both of these are what Wittgenstein called language-games and they have very different rules and goals for playing them. 

It is fair, it seems to me, for each group to get into the other's language-game and ask critical questions that aim at clarification. If Ham's intention is to understand the Bible literally and if we ignore, for now, the fact that the Bible has been translated out of its original language and gone through many different editions, it is still fair to ask, it seems to me, how we can calculate the age of our earth when Genesis admits that the order of creation doesn't admit the tools for defining 'years' for several days. At the same time, it is fair for Creationists to get as deeply into observational science as they can and ask whether God can fairly be excluded from a scientific account of the universe. These are interesting questions, it seems to me, but they do not stand as a "debate" in which either side might be construed as winning.