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Lawrence Krauss On the Pope's Encyclical: Not Even Close?
Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'
Three modes of persuasion/rhetoric identified by Aristotle are ethos, pathos, and logos.
ethos is an appeal to authority or credibility
pathos is an appeal to emotions
logos is an appeal to reason
Tthe pope's statement may have enough ethos with some audiences to make an impact.
The Pope holds a great deal of moral authority. Scientists not so much.
I've read Laudate Si'. It's not really about the science, or arguing that AGW is true, or that biodiversity is being lost, or that pollution is killing people. It takes these things for granted but it does not marshall evidence per se.
It's main point is that AGW, true or not, is evil and must be stopped, and it ties this into social teaching by associating the consumer culture of rich countries with the exploitation and immiseration of small, poor ones; mankind's moral obligation to protect the Earth, and it asserts baldly things like "man has no right" to push a species, any species, even the smallest plankton, to extinction (Francis actually mentions plankton).
I don't hear scientists talk like this, and that's fine, it's probably not their place. But evidence isn't enough to actually move people to action, you do actually have talk about right and wrong, and why this thing is wrong and must be stopped. And Francis specifically argues against the idea that technology will one day solve this problem for us, to him the problem with the planet is 100% between people's ears, it has to do with the way modern people see the world as a resource to be exploited. Don't ask me to defend this, I think he's a little too pessimistic here, but it just continues the idea that his argument isn't about science, or technology, or even the material world, to him it's fundamentally spiritual.
And he has a point; why should we care about climate change if the Earth if it's just a ball of dirt and we can just fly a rocket to another one? Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not. So does Krauss think scientists should hold more moral authority than a Pope? Is that the paradox here? Should scientists teach us right and wrong?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I agree that moral posturing is a largely sterile exercise; but you are using the (possibly true) equivalent between two stances on 'what other people should do to solve this problem' to advance a false equivalence that those two proposals will work similarly well "no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways".
It's nice that there's an encyclical agreeing that listening to the experts on the matter is important, and noting that most predicted effects of climate change will not be blessings upon the already poor is pretty logical pope stuff; but there is a very, very, strong case to be made that the Catholic church is...a poor source of advice... when it comes to either population or to inducing social change.
Even when backed by violence, religious suasion has a lousy track record of keeping people from having sex, regardless of marital status, risk of disease transmission, willingness/unwillingness to deal with possible additional children, etc. It also doesn't have a terribly promising track record on motivating to abstain from various carbon-intensive goods and services if they are available.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion; and simply mitigate some or all of the effects of what people are doing anyway. Whether it's prophylactics or non fossil fuel energy sources, it's always going to be easier to prevent STD spread, or generate electricity without burning dinosaurs than it will be to sell people on celibacy and sitting in the dark.
As I've argued before, much to the anger of some, at least one country, the US, can do a lot by reducing coercion in a critical area that happens to be responsible for around 25% of US CO2 emissions.
The US is the only country I' m aware of where most urban areas are mandated to follow suburban planning policies, making redevelopment within cities prohibitively expensive as all developments are subject to absurd parking mandates that make little sense in high density areas where good doesn't-even-need-subsidies transit should be the norm.
Change that, and give developers more freedom to build what people actually want, and a sizable number of people won't feel forced to live in suburbia any more (and many people who currently live there thinking urban living is somehow synonymous with run-down crime ridden neighborhoods will change their minds.)
Staggeringly enough, I don't think most people want to live inefficiently. Most want to make the maximum use of their dollars to get the best living environment they can. Most state and counties currently force them to waste dollars on supporting huge amounts of infrastructure that offer little value to them.
Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee some idiot will respond to this claiming I'm the one forcing people to do something, because I'm proposing offering a choice of living more efficiently, and that... I don't know... will make people who still choose to live in the middle of nowhere feel bad or something? Or maybe they're terrified that the market will choose the urban areas and all of a sudden suburbia will become run down and impossible to live in? I have no idea. I don't understand the mindset.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Krauss brings up points that the pope doesn't _because_ of the pope's "moral authority". For example, Krauss makes the point that contraception is a must. A large world population is simply unsustainable without doing major environmental harm (and may simply be unsustainable, period). Needless to say, the pope couldn't really go there, although he has previously said that people should have fewer children -- never mind how.
So, while I think the pope is doing much good, he is dangerously restricted by the very moral authority you mention. It's a double-edged sword.
Marketing is the science of coercing people to live differently. Is it OK when it's done in the name of corporate profits, but somehow bad when it's in the name of trying to head off probable disaster?
Please tell us how people addressing climate change are acting out of "greed and self interest". And if you bring up Al Gore's private jet, you have to spend 10 minutes in the Fox News penalty box.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak.
No it does not. Unless you have such a vague notion of faith as to make it effectively meaningless it HAS to intrude on the material plane. Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion. Everyone would have a vague notion of something "beyond" and it would end there. But it doesn't.
It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
There is HUGE amounts of evidence that it doesn't really work like that in the real world. Organized religions cannot help but get involved in claiming all sorts of things that science can and does dispute.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable
And yet the church claims to understand them in great detail except when it is convenient for them to claim to not know. Cannot work both ways.
Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.
The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.
There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
You speak of one type of religion -- one that is anti-science. You are also invoking the so-called conflict thesis, which was basically made up by a distortion of history in the 1800s and which actual historians now recognize is largely bogus.
There are plenty of religions in the world (including the Catholic Church) that have been pioneers in scientific research. Why? Because they believe there is a moral responsibility to understand God's creation, to appreciate it, to protect it.
The pope's recent message is more of this.
The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science.
Can you seriously look at this list of Roman Catholic clergy who were scientists throughout history, including many of people who FOUNDED entire modern scientific disciplines, and tell us that there's a fundamental conflict there?
Read about the relationship between the Catholic Church and science over the past millennium. Aside from the Galileo affair (where the actions of the church should be condemned), you'd be hard-pressed to find many other examples where the church has impeded scientific progress... and MANY periods where they have explicitly promoted and funded it.
Yes, there are plenty examples of anti-science religious wackos out there. By all means, condemn their ignorance. But religion can also be an inspiration to cause people to look harder at the world around them. That's what the Catholic Church has promoted for the past thousand years or so. The belief in "unproven" things generally does not come into conflict in the Catholic Church -- they aren't biblical literalists (unlike some evangelical movements) and pretty much never have been. St. Augustine and other early writers were already talking about the allegorical nature of scripture 1500+ years ago, so they aren't the wacko "young-earth creationists" who insist that evolution can't occur or that the earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
It's one thing to believe in something that is against empirical evidence -- some religions do that. But others mostly believe in supernatural phenomena when it CAN'T be proved nor disproved. (This is the true original meaning of agnosticism, developed by a SCIENTIST to classify a belief that some statements about religion cannot be proved nor disproved from empirical evidence and are thus beyond adjudication by science.)
If such beliefs do not conflict with empirical evidence, then what is your SCIENTIFIC basis for discounting them or declaring them antithetical to science? At worst, they show wishful thinking. Any scientist who has ever bought a lottery ticket should be drummed out of the profession if wishful thinking should be banned. At best, they might inspire some moral or ethical thinking about "bigger questions" that science doesn't usually address.
The Catholic Church not only was pro-science for much of the past 1000 years -- in many cases it was a PIONEER in science. To not admit that fact either shows ignorance or unsupported anti-religious bigotry.
(P.S. I'm NOT a Catholic. I don't care what the pope says. But I do care about ignorance of history. The Catholic Church has been responsible for many bad things throughout history, but so has every other nation or organization which has existed for centuries. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another such organization, nation, or other corporate body that's at least a couple centuries old and has been so consistently pro-science.)
The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science. I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
You have evidently never heard of the Jesuits. It's entirely possible to believe in religion and still be a grounded person - and it's entirely possible to be completely devoted to science and still be crazy (see Nazi Germany as an example). Religion when taught as a form of philosophy (which is what it really should be) can make for a great moral compass. Religion when taught in the form of governmental law is what's harmful.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
The coerced solutions only get noticed when they go wrong. Look at some of the highly successful coerced solutions: Requiring seatbelts in cars, banning the use of CFCs as propellants and refrigerants, banning the use of lead compounds as fuel additives. All cases in which a destructive practice was ended not by voluntary changes, but by a government passing laws and declaring 'Stop doing that or we'll start throwing some executives in jail.'
It took science a few decades to admit Mendel was right, too. Science has lots of authority problems. See Feynman in Cargo Cult Science, where he describes how researchers subsequent to Millikan found ways to fudge their more correct observations about the charge on an electron, because they wanted to agree with the great authority whose experiment they were replicating. Or Feynman's account of how an important finding about rats is ignored by science.
Here are the folks who advise the Pope on science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some names you may recognize: Edward Witten, Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Mario Molina, Maxine Singer, etc.