Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence Summer Service of 18 August 2002 "Truth and Nonsense" David Mix Barrington *********************************** ORDER OF MEETING: August 18, 2002 WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS PRELUDE The Entertainer Scott Joplin Karl Drumm, piano LIGHTING OF THE CHALICE *HYMN #187 It Sounds Along the Ages *OPENING WORDS We covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning [...] The living tradition we share draws from: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, [...] Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit. *COMMUNITY GREETING OFFERTORY Miracle of Miracles Jerry Bock READINGS Lewis Carroll, Steven Pinker INTERLUDE Mairzy Doats Jerry Livingston SERMON "Truth and Nonsense" David Mix Barrington *HYMN #190 Light of Ages and of Nations CLOSING WORDS Responsive Reading #650 "Cherish Your Doubts", by Robert T. Weston POSTLUDE Solace Scott Joplin Child care is available downstairs. We invite you to join us for lemonade and conversation in the parlor after the service. Next week is the last summer service -- regular services (at 9:15 and 11:00) begin on 8 September. Thanks to Karl for the music and to Jennie Barrington for inspiration and advice. ******************************* READINGS: The first reading is probably the single most quoted passage from _Through the Looking Glass_, by Lewis Carroll: "Now I'll give you something to believe," the White Queen remarked. "I'm just one hundred and one, five months, and a day." "I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." The second reading is from _How The Mind Works_, by Steven Pinker "The most common of all follies," wrote H. L. Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints, fairies, angels, demons, cherubim, djinns, devils, and gods. According to polls, more than a quarter of today's Americans believe in witches, almost half believe in ghosts, half believe in the devil, half believe that the book of Genesis is literally true, sixty-nine percent believe in angels, eighty-seven percent believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, and ninety-six percent believe in a God or universal spirit. How does religion fit into a mind that one might have thought was designed to reject the palpably not true? The common answer--that people take comfort in the thought of a benevolent shepherd, a universal plan, or an afterlife--is unsatisfying, because it only raises the question of _why_ a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit. ******************************* Sermon for Summer Service of 18 August 2002 Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence "Truth and Nonsense" David Mix Barrington "Mairzy doats and doazy doats and little lamzey divey". Makes no sense. "Open immediately -- important information about your account." Makes no sense. "I'm from Nigeria, and I need your help to recover my fortune." Makes no sense. There's a lot of nonsense in the world, some meant to entertain us and some to deceive us. As Unitarian Universalists, we talk a lot about "deciding what to believe". A component of that is deciding what _not_ to believe. We do this all the time -- we throw away the junk mail, delete the email, or click past certain channels on the television (I start with Fox News). It's a way to start making sense of the world, by not trying to make sense out of nonsense. In our spiritual and religious lives, as well, there is a lot of nonsense for us to reject. We can agree on that point, I think, even if we disagree on exactly _which_ religious beliefs are nonsense -- I'll get back to that point later. Many of us are here because we've rejected some other religious tradition, or more often _parts_ of that tradition. We're deciding what to keep, what to reject, and what we can learn from other traditions -- this is what the Unitarian Universalist principles call "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning". But how do we find the truth? It isn't exactly a matter of _deciding_ which beliefs are best or nicest, because if we are like Alice we can't just _decide_ to believe something by an act of will. As Steven Pinker suggests, our brains have evolved to be able to believe some things and not others, originally for practical reasons. There is something called "reason" that guides us toward some beliefs and away from others. In my professional life I am a mathematician. I spend a certain amount of time searching out the truth, and distinguishing truth from nonsense. (The latter is particularly necessary with my students' papers.) The story we mathematicians give out to the outside world is that the truths we find are true because we have _proved_ them. A mathematical proof is supposed to be a series of steps, each one clearly justified by some rule, that winds up with the statement to be proved. Statement A implies Statement B, which implies Statement C, which implies Statement D, and so on until you can conclude that Statement Z is proved. In real life you hardly ever see one of these proofs outside the classroom. When we publish a "proof", it's more like an argument that this step-by-step proof _could_ be generated given enough time. Like any argument, it can contain mistakes. You may have heard that Andrew Wiles spent ten years on his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, announced the proof, then had to work several more months to correct a mistake that someone found in his first version. Real mathematics is a human process. _I_ believe that Wiles' proof is correct not because I've ever read it but because the mathematical community believes it. I'm part of that mathematical community, of course, particularly when I review submitted papers. There's a paper on my desk now that I'm pretty sure is completely wrong, though I haven't found the mistake yet -- assuming I do, it will go back to the author and never be published. Or I may eventually decide that the author's argument is convincing, and I'll believe the result. What probably _won't_ happen with this paper is a long-term disagreement about whether it's correct or not. The mathematical community will quickly converge either to a belief that it is right or a belief that it is wrong. (Being wrong, of course, just means that it doesn't prove anything and we still don't know whether the statement is true or false.) Arguments about mathematics _end_ if both parties work hard enough to understand each other's position, because only one of two contradictory statements in mathematics can be true. Why is this? Because mathematics deals with a world that is completely imaginary, completely constructed according to clearly stated rules. If the rules let you prove that something is true, they can't also prove that same statement to be false, unless you've got an inconsistent system where everything is provable. They may be statements you can't prove either way -- in fact Godel's Theorem says there have to be such statements in all the interesting cases -- but they still _are_ either true or false. The real world is not like the mathematical world. We can reason about the real world, and _model_ it with pieces of pure mathematics, but we no longer have the guarantee of certainly we had in mathematics. Our primary tool to reason about the real world is science. We can devise experiments, make careful observations, and formulate testable theories about how the world works. And over the recent centuries, science has shown us truths about the world -- truths of great value both philosophically and practically. There are arguments over scientific questions, and they last longer than the ones about mathematics because they depend on interpretations and on fallible experiments. While belief in the great truths of science is pretty stable, the farther you get away from the laboratory the more likely you are to find disputed ground. Perhaps the murkiest area is medicine, because the human body is an almost inconceivably complicated system, really impossible to understand in detail, yet our lives may depend on the crude understanding that science has been able to give us so far. Here's what you think would be a simple question -- if a human has access to far more food than he or she needs to survive, what mix of foods is the healthiest? As far as I can tell, a majority of doctors think you should have lots of carbohydrates, some protein, and almost no fat, but a sizable minority votes for high fat and protein and few carbohydrates. Both sides brandish studies backing their position, and we consumers are left to make our way through the supermarket as best we can. There probably is some scientific way to settle the question, but it doesn't seem to be available to us yet. Science presupposes a particular view of the world. The things that exist are things that can be observed, either directly with our senses or indirectly by instruments or through their measurable effects. These are the things that Mencken and Pinker called "palpably true" in the quote I read earlier. Gods, demons, ghosts, spirits, afterlives -- all these things are "palpably not true". By the way, did anyone find that reading completely offensive? I can see how you would, although I admit that their view of the world is fundamentally mine as well -- the world is what it is, as revealed to us by observation and by science. It's not really any less dogmatic than any other religious view, is it? And the smug satisfaction in it, particularly in Mencken's visible contempt for anyone who would dare to believe in anything else, does sort of beg to be challenged. So _are_ there reasons to believe in the palpably not true? One approach to challenging the Menckens and Pinkers of the world is to attack their assumptions on their own grounds. We have "scientific creationists", for example, who argue that the theory of evolution is not scientifically valid. We have "parapsychologists" who document observations of ghosts or psychics. For almost any supernatural belief there is someone who claims it can be justified on purely scientific grounds. I don't believe any of these people. I admit that in rejecting them I'm not always being scientific, because I'm not examining their evidence or trying to duplicate their findings. Why? Because I don't have time. My overall judgment is that scientific evidence of the supernatural tends to vanish like cockroaches when you shine the light of careful observation on it -- as the evidence for cold fusion dried up after a few promising experiments. A lot of experimental results can be produced by wishful thinking or sloppiness, and some can be produced by outright fraud. After I see what gifted illusionists like James Randi or Penn and Teller can make _appear_ to happen by deliberate fraud, I have a faith in the reality of the real world that's much harder to shake by any report of supernatural events. That being said, there are plenty of reasons to believe in the palpably not true. Consider a person's "will to live". Linda Lascelles told us a few weeks ago about medical patients who fared better when their healers paid attention to their entire lives and not just their observable medical data. She argued that the narrow scientific view of the body, as a machine with mechanical problems to be fixed, isn't adequate to give the best care to the sick. Maybe you have to talk about "healing the spirit" to do the job right, even if there's no scientific evidence for the existence of a "spirit". Consider the character of Motel the tailor in _Fiddler on the Roof_, who sings the song that Karl played for the offertory. Motel has just found out, against all expectation, that he will be allowed to marry his true love Tzeitel. His reaction isn't a rational or scientific one -- he compares the miracle he has just experienced with the stories of his Jewish religious tradition, of the miracles God performed on behalf of His people. Or for that matter, consider the "transcendent sense of mystery and wonder" we spoke of earlier as a source of Unitarian Universalist tradition. Like any good poetry, those words mean something different to every person who hears them. They make me think of the "inner light" that Quakers claim as the center of their religious experience. I hope you've all had the feeling of looking out at a landscape, for example, and seeing it as a miracle, in the same way Motel sees Tzeitel's face as a miracle. That's a subjective experience, not rational or scientific. But is it any less _real_ for all that? Maybe, maybe not. Our feelings can bring us an inner light, or they can bring us anger, jealousy, or madness. Feeling can augment thinking, but never substitute for it entirely. I may think that your belief in a God or an afterlife is nonsense. You may think that my skeptical narrow-mindedness is nonsense. In mathematics, one of those two contradictory statements would be wrong, and careful argument and consideration of our assumptions would decide which one it is. In science, we could perhaps devise an experiment to decide which of us is wrong. If no conceivable experiment could ever settle the question, than _as scientists_ we would reject the dispute as meaningless, or at least unresolvable. In matters of religion, though, we are inevitably going to have to live with contradictions. There are contradictions and disagreements in every religious community, even those that have a set list of beliefs that everyone agrees to. There are perhaps even more contradictions and disagreements in _our_ community, where we have no such "creed". (The UU Principles were written down, very eloquently in my opinion, by a _committee_, as a list of things that most of us mostly believe in, but there's no reason why an individual UU might not have a problem with one or more or even all of them.) We have UU's who also consider themselves Christians, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, and Humanists, together no doubt with other categories I've forgotten. We've agreed to join together in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning -- we've hired a minister to speak on Sundays not to tell us what the truth is, but to _lead_ us toward serious thought about our own beliefs. My sister Jennie is a minister, and leads a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Winchendon. I showed her the first half of this sermon earlier this week, and she made a point in return that I'd like to leave you with. I've been talking a lot about the _process_ of determining the truth, in mathematics or science, or in our own minds about our religious beliefs. But process isn't everything, particularly in a religious community. It may not be enough to say to each other: "Your beliefs are nonsense, but I'll overlook that in order to work with you in a spirit of cooperation." That's important to say, of course, but it may not be enough. When we join together as a community to search for truth and meaning, it's important that we _be_ a community. Joining together in rituals, like this service today, helps to make us a community. Working together toward common goals helps to make us a community. Discussing each other's ideas at coffee hour or in a religious education class helps to make us a community. But what Jennie pointed out to me is that discussing may not be enough -- we need imagination, a sense of play. We need to be able to take someone else's impossible belief and imagine it as our own. Isn't that what we do when we read a novel or see a play? What's that you say? You think you can't believe impossible things? "Can't you," the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."