TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Visions of Darwin Museum launches contest for photos inspired by Darwin news.bbc.co.uk |
Observatory: People Hear With Their Skin as Well as Their Ears Researchers have added to evidence that suggests an innate ability among humans to integrate different sensory cues. feeds.nytimes.com |
Genome study finds pandas similar to dogs As thousands of giant panda lovers flock to see Adelaide Zoo's giant pandas, Wang Wang and Funi, a Chinese study has shown their genome is similar to the dog. abc.net.au |
Prayer and nonsense | Andrew Brown The patent untruth of religious language might have more benefits besides making it memorableI have been reading the letters of CS Lewis again: they seem written from an immense distance. In important ways, they are. He reached the trenches, as a second lieutenant in France, on his 19th birthday; of the time when he got his blighty wound, the regimental history records that The casualties of the 1st battalion between 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.Incidentally, the wounds that ended his war were caused by a British shell dropping short, or what we would now call "friendly fire". But when there are 215 casualties in one unexceptional regiment within two days, no one makes a big fuss about whose shells kill whom. But for all the social distance to Lewis's world, two of his characteristics leap straight to ours. The first is what a good reader he was, which is to say a good critic. The other is that it mattered. He was always trying to write something more than "a readable and convincing slab of claptrap" (as he described Macauley) and very seldom failed, however often he was wrong. But his mythology of language was extremely strange. In a letter to his brother, (17 January 1932) he writes As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for a clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone … Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe – if you can regard them as "languages" – which till have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare "Our Father which art in Heaven" with "The supreme being transcends space and time". The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dextrous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all ...I am not interested here in the question of whether there is any external referent for "Our Father, who art in Heaven", though I suppose I should point out for the benefit of the sky-pixie crowd that Lewis takes for granted that the meaning cannot be literal. That is the whole point of his argument. I am more interested in a a potentially much more destructive approach, which came out of a paper published last year with the wonderful title "Connections from Kafka" by two psychologists, Travis Proulx, and Steven Heine. The very short form of their argument (which deserves a longer post on its own) is that nonsense or the violation of expectations actually strengthens our ability to find meaning. What's more, if we are exposed to nonsense or loss of meaning in one area , this will increase the meaning and order we find in others. Earlier work of theirs has shown that moral beliefs or group affiliation can be strengthened simply by swapping the experimenter out, without explanation, halfway through a test. That, surely, is the mechanism behind all modern fundamentalisms. Anyway, there is lots of evidence that anxiety increases our tendency to see patterns and meaning in the world. The standard atheist assumption is of course that these patterns don't really exist. In some cases, and some experiments, they don't. But the latest Proulx and Heine paper had a fascinating twist: after being exposed to a twisted version of a Kafka story, in which nothing at all made sense, their subjects were better able to detect patterns that really existed in letter strings they were given to match. The counter-intuitive nature of religious language is often remarked. There are whole theories about just how much counter-intuitiveness is needed to make a religious story most memorable and thus most widespread. But counter-intuitiveness is really just another term for the violation of expectation and the denial of meaning. If Proulx and Heine are right, then counter-intuitive religious language will not just be more memorable: it will help the participants to perceive meaning in the threatening world around them. Sometimes that meaning will be objectively there. This is a long way back to CS Lewis, but I think it shows his instinct was right: "Our Father, who art in heaven" actually means something to the people who say it, in a way that more literally sensible language just couldn't. The rule for religious language is clear: if a dalek could understand it, it wouldn't be worth saying.ReligionPsychologyAtheismCS LewisChristianityAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Why Haiti keeps getting hammered by disasters When it comes to natural disasters, Haiti seems to have a bull's-eye on it. That's because of a killer combination of geography, poverty, social problems, slipshod building standards and bad luck, experts say.... hosted.ap.org |