The Internet as Omnipresence

In a previous post (“Congregationality, Crossroadsivity, and the Internet”), I wrote about the collapse of the divide between congregation points and crossroads as a result of the Digital Revolution and the emergence of the Internet. In this post, I would like to explore some of the underpinnings and wider implications of that collapse.

The collapse of the divide between congregationality and crossroadsivity is in reality a surface manifestation of a deeper, more fundamental collapse, the collapse of physical space brought about by the Digital Revolution. By locating human activity primarily in virtual space, the Digtal Revolution has rendered physical (that is, geographical) space largely irrelevant, especially for cultural evolution. Prior to the Digital Revolution, geographical location, geographical remoteness, and geographical isolation were major constraints upon cultural evolution. Matt Ridley (in a TED Talk) offers the example of Tasmania, which was cut off from the Australian mainland by a dramatic rise in sea level several thousand years ago. The result was cultural regression rather than cultural evolution on the island of Tasmania. Culture on Tasmania devolved, Ridley explains, partly because there was no cultural exchange between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. The Tasmanians did not have the sea-faring “technology” that would enable them to cross the strait between the two land masses, and this effectively placed them in geographical isolation. With the introduction of virtual space, however, physical remoteness or geographical isolation becomes immaterial to cultural exchange or any other memetic activity for that matter.

Virtual space is, paradoxically, “spaceless” and infinite. That is to say, it has zero dimensions. It collapses the three-dimensionality of physical space into non-dimensionality. Virtual space cannot be described in the language of Cartesian coordinates, precisely because of its virtuality, its lack of extension in physical space. It might be said that the “digitization of culture” did for space what Einstein did for time, but in reverse. While the “Relativity Revolution” put dimensionality into time (by showing that time is “the fourth dimension” and is therefore part of a “space-time continuum”), the Digital Revolution took the dimensionality out of space and released the very concept of space itself from its moorings in the realm of physicality.

The collapse of the traditional concept of space as being fundamentally dimensional has serious implications for the notion of presence. Traditionally, to be present is to be located in a given place (identifiable by Cartesian coordinates) at a given time. A body cannot occupy two or more distinct locations at any given point in time. This is the essence of presence. However, if space is non-dimensional, as it is in the case of virtual space, then the “extensionality” (used here in a non-technical sense) of space vanishes, and with it, presence evaporates. Either that, or presence becomes omnipresence, since in virtual space, here is everywhere and everywhere is here, and one can consequently be everywhere now. Thus, the Digital Revolution has bestowed upon humans that rare attribute once reserved exclusively for the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian God: omnipresence. Through the Internet (and related technologies), every human on the planet has the possibility of being present in every location on the globe at every single instant of time. It is true that the reach of the Internet is not quite universal, and there are portions of the globe that are not yet accessible through the Internet. Nevertheless, in theory such a universal, unbounded presence is possible—and it is important to note that it is not merely a theoretical, “virtual” (imaginary) sort of omnipresence, but an actual presence, since virtual space maps directly onto physical space in the world of the Internet. An interesting incident that occurred a few years ago illustrates this point beautifully. It is the story of someone in the Philippines saving the life of a California woman who had a heart attack in her home in California. The person in the Philippines was watching the California woman’s webcam camcast and noticed her collapse suddenly on camera. When no one came to her aid, he realized that she was alone at home and called the local police in the Philippines. They contacted the local police in California who arranged to have an ambulance dispatched to the woman’s house, and her life was thus saved. All of this happened in a matter of minutes. So, for all practical purposes, the person in the Philippines was actually present in the room with the California woman. Other, more general examples can be cited, such as telesurgery (or "remote surgery"), in which surgeons operate on patients hundreds or even thousands of miles removed from where they are by means of computer-controlled robots.

This suggests that we now need to revise our definition of the word “presence.” No longer can it be restricted to being present “in the body.” Presence is now much more than just the state of “being there” as traditionally understood. In the case of the California woman whose life was saved, the consciousness of the person in the Philippines was present in her room, even though his body was thousands of miles away. Thus, we now have a separation between the bodies of individuals and the consciousness associated with those bodies. The Digital Revolution has made it possible for individual consciousness to extend far beyond the narrow limits set by the bodies of the individuals in question. To understand this notion of extension, we might invoke that well-worn anthropological insight that tools are an extension of the hand. The idea here is that the human hand in limited in what it can do, but tools help us to transcend that limitation and extend the hand’s capabilities. Tool and hand become parts of one single continuum, and it is difficult to determine precisely where hand ends and tool begins, at least as far as function goes. This extending function is, of course, common to all technology (here understood in its broadest sense). Technology as such is, by definition, directed towards transcending human limitations, whether physical or otherwise. Having established this extending function of technology, it is now possible to demonstrate that digital technology, and in particular the Internet, with its entourage of communications devices such as smart phones and iPads and so on, fulfill an extending function. The question is: What exactly do these technologies and their related devices extend? As the example of the California woman shows, they extend human presence. But they do more than merely extend our presence beyond our bodies: they make that extension absolute, that is, they carry it to the nth degree, to the point where no further extension is possible, to the point of omnipresence.

Our presence was once limited to our physical bodies. We laboured long under this limitation, and were greatly hampered by it—and in our thinking we are perhaps still haunted by its ghost. Our language is riddled with the rhetoric of physical, geographical limitation. We speak of “being at the right place at the right time.” And it was once fashionable in intellectual circles to claim that “Geography is Destiny.” Not any more—now that the Digital Revolution has released human consciousness from its moorings in the human body and set it free to wander at will among the vast and boundless regions of virtual space. The omnipresence possible in virtual space renders physical, geographical space practically irrelevant in our lives. This is why geographical congregation points and geographical crossroads don’t matter any more for cultural evolution.

The omnipresence conferred by the Digital Revolution is of a very different sort from the omnipresence that George Orwell, in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, feared technology would afford to the totalitarian state. In the novel, this state-controlled omnipresence takes the form of the All-Seeing Eye of “Big Brother,” who is constantly watching everything everywhere by means of ubiquitous television cameras—a perhaps none-too-subtle allusion to the All-Seeing Eye of God, under whose penetrating gaze F. Scott-Fitzgerald’s characters also quaked as they passed through the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. This intimidating sort of omnipresence is intended to keep humans in line, to prevent them from going beyond the bounds of arbitrarily set limits—whether set by the state or by religious authorities. By contrast, the omnipresence of virtual space is “democratic” and liberating. It is available (at least in theory) to all (in India, even slum dwellers have cell phones, according to Ridley), and it strips away all boundaries except those that might be set by personal choice.

This is a major advance in cultural evolution. It is a great leap forward, in the order of the leap that occurred with the “discovery” of agriculture and later with the introduction of movable type to the printing process. Just as the long-term consequences of agriculture and movable type could not be imagined by the people who introduced these innovations, so we today cannot imagine (though we can speculate) what the larger consequences of the collapse of space and the ushering in of omnipresence will be. But we do know one thing: they will be enormous.

Congregationality, Crossroadsivity, and the Internet

Congregationality is the phenomenon by which like-minded people gather together in one place (or “congregate”) for the purposes of mutual support and the furtherance of some common cause. (This concept should not be saddled with the religious connotations of the word “congregation,” though religious congregations are an excellent example of the phenomenon.) Ethan Zuckerman (in a TED Talk) uses the term “flocking” for this phenomenon, clearly drawing upon the old adage "Birds of a feather flock together."

Crossroadsivity is the quality (or the measure of the quality) of being a point where various flows of (social, cultural, or other) traffic cross each other. Crossroads serve to connect remote locations to each other. The greater the connectivity at such points, the greater their crossroadsivity. Hubs and nexus points may be said to possess a high degree of crossroadsivity.

Congregationality and crossroadsivity play a vital role in cultural evolution.

Commonly held memes draw people together (much as “strange attractors” form clustering structures in Chaos Theory), but this is for social rather than memetic reasons. Congregations form out of the personal need for mutual support, whether it is “moral support” or “creative support.” Artists hobnob with other artists, and “schools” and “movements” of art emerge spontaneously as a result. Certain areas become know as places for certain types of people (with a certain meme matrix) to congregate. Paris became a congregation point for Cubists (among other avant-garde artists) in the early 20th century, and for existentialists a generation later. Today, in a similar manner, fashion designers congregate in Paris, Milan, or London, and the glitterati congregate in the Swiss Alps. American homosexuals at one time congregated in California (in the Los Angeles/San Francisco area) or, on the East Coast, in Greenwich Village (which was also a congregation point for artists and other “bohemians”). These congregation points achieve their status as congregation points because they are conducive to the preservation and propagation of the memes held by the congregants. Note that gay culture flourished in California and New York precisely because of the congregation of gays and lesbians in these areas, and also precisely because these areas provided the gays and lesbians who flocked there with the wherewithal to flourish. Tehran, by contrast, could not conceivably be a congregation point for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community—or for free thinkers or secular humanists for that matter. The memetic climate there is simply not conducive to the preservation of such meme complexes.

Quite different from, but related to, the congregation point is the crossroads. The crossroads is not an attractor in the way that a congregation point is. Its virtue lies in its having a strategic location. In other words, it just happens to be a place that travellers have to pass through on their way to some other destination. People are forced to come to crossroads by circumstances unrelated to their memetic makeup or their desire for the company of others with similar meme complexes. The greater the amount of traffic that passes through a crossroads, the richer a place it will be for cultural evolution, for it brings together people with different meme matrices and provides an opportunity for meme mixing, meme borrowing, and meme propagation. Travellers pick up memes at the crossroads from strangers that they encounter, often by accident, and then carry these newly acquired memes off to remote destinations, thus aiding in their propagation. The Fertile Crescent was just such a crossroads in the ancient world, being located, as it was, at the intersection of several trade and migration routes, and it provided the impetus for a great deal of cultural evolution. In fact, it would be fair to say that the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent almost single-handedly determined the shape of the world as we know it today. Over the centuries, however, the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent declined as Rome assumed dominance through its military might and took over as the primary crossroads of the ancient world, as pithily encapsulated in the saying "All roads lead to Rome." Today, the former Fertile Crescent, now renamed memetically “The Middle East,” serves as a crossroads of a different kind, as various groups fight for possession of it or for dominance in the region. It should be noted that crossroads do not necessarily have to be located where trade and migratory routes intersect. Centres of pilgrimage also qualify as crossroads in terms of memetics. They are a sort of cross between a crossroads and a congregation point, for they do attract people to them, but only temporarily, and in this sense they are crossroads-like. Their fluxing populations make them the perfect mixing ground for all sorts of memes. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales provides good evidence that pilgrimage sites—and the act of pilgrimage itself—served as an effective means of meme mixing and meme transfer. In Chaucer’s work, various travelling pilgrims exchange stories and respond to each others’ stories, and they presumably carried these stories back with them to wherever they came from, once the pilgrimage was accomplished.

It is not often that a given location serves both as a crossroads and also as a congregation point. Crossroads are not typically conducive to the preservation of the memes of special interest groups, simply because of the transitory nature of their fluxing populations. Thus, crossroads do not make good congregation points, which tend to be more settled and have more stable populations. Congregation points need to offer a degree of seclusion and protection against the onslaughts of opposing or countervailing forces, something that crossroads cannot provide. However, the digital revolution of the late 20th century collapsed that traditional divide between congregation points and crossroads. Today, the Internet has evolved into a single entity that serves both functions remarkably well, integrating, as it does, the crossroads and the congregation point into one overarching, all-encompassing system.

First, it allows for the co-existence in one place (in virtual space) of multiple congregation points. Websites that cater to every conceivable special interest can be found on the Internet, from Goth culture to esoteric brands of geekery. Homosexuals do not need to congregate in Greenwich Village or along Castro Street any more, though many still do. Their new congregation place is the social networking websites that cater specifically to the interests of the LGBT community, something they can access without ever leaving home. Terms such as “surfing” and “browsing” when applied to the Internet capture quite aptly the congretationality of the Internet. Surfers tend to congregate in areas where the size and speed of the waves make for the most exciting and challenging surfing, and cattle browse where pastures are greenest. Surfing and browsing are congregational activities, whether they are understood literally or metaphorically.

The Internet also functions as a universal crossroads where people from all over the world pass in and out on their way to some other destination. Social networking sites such as Facebook and professional networking sites such as Linkedin are particularly desisgned to fulfill this “crossroads” function. A site such as Facebook makes it “a breeze” to flit in and out of the lives of other people at will, taking in or leaving out as much or as little as one is inclined. The Search Engine (as epitomized by Google) is a prime contributor to the crossroadsivity of the Internet. Search engines makes it possible to pass through, pick things up, and move on, all very much on the fly. It is the new mode of travel along the Information Superhighway. It is the perfect medium for the spread of memes, and it spreads them more rapidly and efficiently than physical crossroads ever did.

Paradigm Shifts in Cultural Evolution

(Continued from the previous post, "Memes, Replication, and Application")

While the small incremental changes that occur through copying errors in the imitation process do lead to cultural “microevolution” (the development of a new style of pottery, for example, or a new shape for an arrowhead) major advances, which we might refer to as “paradigm shifts,” are not achieved through the accumulation of small errors. When a paradigm shift occurs, there is a sideways movement in the flow of evolution, rather than a branching off, as in biological evolution. This is where the analogy between biological evolution and cultural evolution breaks down. The classic model of biological evolution is the tree structure, often referred to as the Tree of Life, now sometimes modified to the Web of Life (in an attempt to make the model more “three-dimensional”). However, the tree metaphor does not quite suit what goes on in cultural evolution. There is no metaphor that can be drawn upon for a model of cultural evolution. The closest one can come to creating a visual model of the process is to invoke the image of a series of train tracks, with cultural trains running along them. Every now and then, a train jumps from one track to another (something that has to be imagined, since it does not occur in reality). Perhaps one might think of quantum particles making their quantum leaps from one energy level to another. Jumping the tracks works better than quantum leaping as a model for cultural evolution, however, since the train that has jumped to another track proceeds along that track and goes off in a completely different direction from the one it was originally travelling in. This is the essence of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.

Perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift in cultural history is the introduction of agriculture (here used broadly to include animal husbandry). It brought about a fundamental change in the way humans lived, and it took human evolution (both cultural and biological) in an entirely new direction. What is important to note is that there is no smooth transition or continuum between hunting-gathering and agriculture. There were no small incremental steps by which one “evolved” into the other. There was an enormous leap of the imagination, a leap in which a lateral move was made to an entirely new way of thinking about the acquisition of sustenance for the preservation of life. In making this leap, humans gave birth to the notion of “food” and to the conceptual distinction between sustenance and food. The instrument that made the leap possible was, not unsurprisingly, a meme—what we might call the “production” meme. This meme had been around for a while and had contributed greatly to the business of sustenance acquisition, for humans had been devising and producing tools for the purposes of hunting and gathering for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture. What was new was the idea that sustenance could be produced just as tools could be produced—a classic example of the transapplication of a meme. When the “production” meme was “transapplied” to the acquisition of sustenance, a new meme was created—the “food” meme. Food, then, is defined, in its simplest terms, as sustenance produced. No other species produces its own sustenance, and this is one of the first things that set the human species apart from its other animal relatives. We might speak of fish as “food” for polar bears or seeds and worms as “food” for birds, but this is surely a metaphorical usage—a metaphor applied backwards (in the context of meme generation) in that it is not the kind of metaphor that leads to cultural evolution as described above. Only humans can be said truly to have “food”—understood here as sustenance produced intentionally and in a planned and organized fashion.

The introduction of food production by means of agriculture was perhaps the first paradigm shift in cultural history, and it put the human species on a very different track—the fast track, so to speak, for cultural evolution then took off at lightning speed and began to advance exponentially. Prior to this great turning point in cultural history, cultural evolution proceeded at a glacial pace, precisely because transapplication had not yet been discovered and any changes that occurred did so only along the track of imitation and minor variation. Once the “transapplication” meme established itself in human consciousness, cultural evolution began to take off in leaps and bounds. People everywhere began transapplying memes and producing new ones as a result. The difference between imitation and transapplication is that imitation may give rise to new products (which may be thought of as “memes” of a lower sort), such as a more efficient spear or a sleeker arrowhead, but transapplication gives rise to fundamentally new memes (which are the “higher” memes). The “food” meme did not exist until the “production” meme was transapplied to the activity of acquiring sustenance. The products that resulted from the introduction of the “food” meme were of a fundamentally different sort from earlier products in the same category. Food products grown or raised in a field for the express purpose of sustaining human life belong to a different order from fruit growing on a tree in the wild or an animal hunted down and eaten on the fly. The latter belong to the “feast-or-famine” mode of life, whereas the latter do not. Interestingly enough, human biology did not keep up with human cultural evolution. The current spate of obesity around the world but particularly in North America owes at least something to the fact that human biology has not yet adjusted to the constant and plentiful supply of food that is available to humans today as a consequence of the introduction of the “food” meme not so very long ago in human history.

The lesson to be learned is that paradigm shifts may have a downside and that cultural evolution is not always an “upwards and onwards” endeavour. But the broader lesson is that paradigm shifts in cultural evolution owe their occurrence specifically to the presence of the "transapplication" meme and the activity of transapplying memes from one area of life to another.

Memes, Replication, and Application

While Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine) seem to think that meme replication through imitation and variation is a sufficient condition for cultural evolution to take place, the process is in fact much more complex than that.

Cultural evolution takes place largely through the application of memes rather than through mere replication of them. The process involves a self-conscious mind deliberately selecting a meme and applying it in a way that it has never been applied before. If mere replication is the goal, then not much cultural evolution will take place. An idea, custom, or practice will become more and more prevalent quantitatively, but no significant qualitative change will take place in the given culture. Errors in replication of the meme will not be sufficient to push the culture over the threshold of stasis. Stasis is the default value, but stasis is not of much use in evolution—cultural or otherwise. Innovation is what drives cultural evolution, and innovation is achieved by applying already existing memes to new situations such that new memes emerge. So-called “paradigm shifts” cannot occur merely by replication. Rather, they are generated by what might be termed “transapplication” (the application of a meme outside the sphere of its origin)—and transapplication goes well beyond mere variation through errors in imitation, as conceived in Dawkins’s and Blackmore’s scheme.

For example, early on in human history, our ancestors took the “self-preservation” meme from the biological realm and applied it to non-biological entities, especially corporate entities such as the tribe or nation, a given religion, or some other social institution. The application of the “self-preservation” meme to the tribe or nation gave rise to the “war” meme and that in turn gave rise to an entire panoply of weapons of war, each a meme in its own right. None of this could have been achieved through mere replication and the hope that errors would accidentally creep in in the process of imitation.

The use of fire for cooking is another example of a meme being applied outside of its original sphere. Whether the discovery that fire could make animal flesh (and some plants) more digestible to humans was accidental or deliberate, the conscious registering of this possibility in the minds of early humans almost certainly involved a “transapplication” operation. In other words, even if an early human had accidentally come upon the carcass of an animal that had died in a forest fire and had sampled some of its flesh and found it to be eminently palatable, the idea that he or she could replicate this effect had to have involved the notion of applying fire to a new purpose. (It is assumed here that the original “purpose” of fire, as a meme in human culture, was either the protection of humans against attacks by wild animals or the securing of warmth in cold climates.)

The very notion of application is itself a meme, and it is underpinned by yet another meme: the “metaphor” (or “analogy”) meme. While we are accustomed to thinking of metaphors as something poetic or, more broadly, literary (something abstract, existing only in the mind), the reality is that the vast majority of our behaviour is metaphorical or has its origins in metaphor (or analogy). Hunting is a "metaphor" for gathering; it is the "gathering" of animals rather than of plants. And, from a memetic point of view, it is fair to say that the hunting meme resulted from the transapplication of the “gathering” meme from the realm of plants to the realm of animals. This “leap” from one realm to the other is at its root identical to the leap that takes place in metaphorical thinking, where one routinely leaps across the boundary between one category of things and another. It is the sort of mental process that Edward de Bono called “lateral thinking.”

Darwin’s discovery of the process of natural selection came as a result of precisely this kind of metaphorical (or analogical, or lateral) thought process and the transapplication that it generates. In an intuitive leap worthy of a Shakespeare or a Milton, he applied the theories of Malthus, Adam Smith, and Charles Lyell from the fields of population dynamics, economics, and geology respectively, to the field of biology. The meme that resulted generated possibly the greatest “paradigm shift” in modern history. The feat that Darwin accomplished owed virtually nothing to mere replication by imitation and variation, and a great deal to deliberate transapplication of existing memes to new areas of human interest.

Tongue Twister of the Day

Stuttering tutors taught titterring tots in top-rated tatters to titrate their nitrates in the tottering turrets of Tottenham tetrarchs.

Tongue Twister of the Day

Santa sauntered certainly in scintillating splendour to the saintly centaur's centre in sunlit Santorini.

Tongue Twister of the Day

Shell-shocked Shirley surely shellacked the polyps and collops that Sherlock and Shylock shyly but slyly scallopped.

A Response to Tim Crane's Article in the NYT on Science and Religion

In today’s New York Times, Tim Crane has written a piece entitled “Mystery and Evidence” (click here to read the article) on the relationship between science and religion, ostensibly with the purpose of promoting understanding between believers and non-believers. It should be mentioned that Crane describes himself as an atheist in the article, and is writing as one who is sympathetic to religion, even as he rejects it (something he goes so far as to disclose in the article).

I am truly appalled by the lack of intellectual rigour and the unsophisticated thinking that Crane displays in his article—especially since he professes to espouse atheism. One would expect something of a higher calibre from an atheist. Perhaps he is “stooping to conquer”—stooping, that is, to the level of the believer—but at what price? Whatever the case may be, he displays at best a tenuous grasp of both science and religion and is certainly not qualified to write on either subject. Anyone who can write a statement such as “Science too has its share of mysteries (or rather: things that must simply be accepted without further explanation)” is immediately disqualified from writing anything worthwhile about science—and, by extension, about its relation to religion.

With regard to science, the picture that he paints of what it is all about is at best a grotesque caricature. He writes: “The essence of science involves making hypotheses about the causes and natures of things ….” This is a very narrow view of what scientists do. Science is both inductive and deductive, and hypothesis-formulation is only one (perhaps rather small) aspect of what is involved. By harping on the “hypothesis” idea (the word “hypothesis” in its various forms appears at least 20 times in the article by my count), and using that as the pivot upon which he turns the difference between science and religion, he obfuscates the issue and does a disservice to both science and religion. In its broadest sense, science is the activity of investigating natural and social phenomena and factual claims about them. It is true that in the so-called “scientific method,” hypotheses are proposed and tested, but this is a very small part of what scientists actually do.

When, for example, the police claim that a crime has been committed, the forensic scientist is called in to investigate this claim with the intention of determining whether the claim is true or false, and no hypothesis is involved whatsoever. The police may have some “hypothesis” about who committed the crime (what they call “the suspect”), but the forensic scientist has no interest at all in this hypothesis. Forensic science merely examines the evidence left at the scene of the alleged crime and interprets it for the police. If forensics is being applied to a dead body, for example, it can say with a fair degree of certainty whether the death was intentional or accidental. If the latter is the case, science can say definitively that the claim that a crime was committed is false. This is the deductive aspect of science, and it is observed widely throughout all the scientific disciplines. Actuarial science, for example, applies (deductively) the principles of statistical mathematics to the assessment of risk, without any need of hypotheses. Materials science is in the business of applying already existing scientific knowledge to explaining why certain materials behave in the way that they do and to the production of new and better materials—and hypotheses (in the strict sense of the term) simply do not enter into the picture. There are dozens of other scientific disciplines like these three in which hypothesizing is simply not involved in any fundamental way. In this broad understanding of science—that is, science as the investigation of phenomena and factual claims—history, too, is a “science” in that it proceeds by examining what evidence there is for claims that a certain event occurred. No historian worthy of the name would write a history of the Second World War, for example, without looking into the evidence that might exist for the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany. So-called “Holocaust deniers” claim that the evidence is insufficient or non-existent, but most historians are convinced, on the basis of the evidence that does exist, that the “Holocaust” did occur. They are convinced, not merely because the Jews claim that they were persecuted by the Nazi, but because these historians have examined the evidence scientifically in an attempt to verify or disconfirm the claim. They use scientific methods and principles to authenticate documents and other artefacts, but do not typically employ hypotheses in what they do.

Crane mentions history and the historical claims made by religions, and in particular he refers to the centrality of the historical claims made by Christianity. But once again, he clouds the issue by couching the discussion in the language of “hypotheses” and conflating “claims” and “hypotheses.” He seems to be unaware of the fundamental difference between the two. A claim is a statement that something is true without accompanying evidence to back it up. An hypothesis is a tentative explanation for some observed phenomenon. History is not interested in hypotheses, since it is not in the business of offering explanations, tentative or otherwise. In the process of writing a reliable account of the past, historians investigate claims that certain events occurred, looking for evidence that might substantiate or nullify the claim. In this sense, history is as much a science as physics or chemistry or forensics, and it works in collaboration with other sciences, such as archaeology, chemistry, botany, and many more. Two good examples of how history works “scientifically” in collaboration with other sciences involve the controversies surrounding the Shroud of Turin and the James Ossuary, both of which have a bearing on the historical claims of Christianity. The general consensus of science and history is that both artefacts are forgeries and that the "religious" claims surrounding them are therefore false.

The mention of the Shroud of Turin and the James Ossuary brings us to an examination of Crane’s claims about evidence and its place in religion. He suggests that evidence is irrelevant or at least inconsequential to religious belief. However, the very presence of the Shroud of Turin, the James Ossuary, and a multitude of other religious artefacts and relics bears silent witness to the importance of evidence for Christian belief. Evidence is, in fact, so important to the believer that it needs to be fabricated when none exists, as in the two examples just mentioned. There would be no need for the Shroud of Turin and the James Ossuary if evidence was not important to the believer. The only reason that these objects exists is that somebody somewhere was eager to establish the historicity of Christ.

One of the fundamental goals of the believer, at least in Christianity and Islam, is to convert the non-believer, and the best way to do this, apparently, is to offer evidence (fabricated or otherwise). The pagans of pre-Christian Europe were loath to relinquish their paganism, and it was only through “signs and wonders” (and occasionally a combination of trickery and coercion) that the Church was able to convince them to forsake their pagan ways and adopt Christianity. In our own time, the Intelligent Design movement is another attempt on the part of believers to convince non-believers of the validity of Creationism through so-called “scientific” evidence. What is more, the Bible is replete with examples of evidence-proffering. The Ten Plagues on Egypt were supposedly Moses’ way of offering Pharaoh evidence that Yahweh was more powerful than the Egyptian gods. The “Empty Tomb” is continually held up as evidence of Christ’s resurrection. Christ himself invoked the “evidence principle” in his now oft-repeated dictum: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7: 16). And he wasn’t above offering “Doubting Thomas” physical evidence of his corporeality, while at the same time tut-tutting at that unfortunate apostle’s skepticism and lack of faith and his demand for empirical evidence. What is more, Christ rather shamelessly made a public display of performing spectacular miracles as evidence of his divinity—or at least of his special access to his Father in heaven. And he conferred on his disciples the power to perform similar miracles as well—and seventy of them went out and did precisely what he empowered them to do as part of their preaching and proselytizing. If Christ had been really concerned about healing the sick and helping people, he could have (and would have) done so quietly, in private, without any ostentatious display (something he hypocritically accused the Pharisees of). But most of his miracles (at least as they are recorded in the gospels) were performed in very public places in the presence of large crowds of people—the very first one being performed at a wedding, no less, and it certainly “wowed” the crowd. It is a sobering thought that before there was Madison Avenue, Christ (as he is portrayed in the gospels) had mastered the art of self-promotion and publicity through spectacular displays of “evidence.”

Christians are always looking for evidence to justify and confirm their faith, and every little coincidence is seized upon as evidence of the existence of God and of his love and care for those who believe in him. Crane mentions prayers that go unanswered as evidence that Christians are not concerned with evidence, but one has simply to look through the vast body of Christian literature to find millions of examples of claims of prayers being answered. What is this if it is not evidence gathering? Why bother mentioning that one’s prayers were answered if evidence is not important? The problem with Christianity is not that it dismisses evidence altogether, but rather that it reserves the right to pick and choose what evidence it will consider and what it will disregard and suppress. This is one of the things that sets it apart from science. The scientist does not allow himself or herself the luxury of choosing his or her evidence, and in this the scientist can be said to have much greater integrity than the religionist. Scientists are bound by the code of conduct of their profession to go wherever the evidence leads; religionists do not set such limits upon themselves. For them evidence is a matter of convenience: they will capitalize on it when it is convenient for them to do so and when it promotes their cause.

To return to the place of historical claims in religion, Crane writes: “Christianity does make factual, historical claims. But this is not the same as being a kind of proto-science.” However, as I have just shown, any historical claim, no matter who makes it, is subject to verification by scientific methods. He further goes on to make the remarkably ignorant statement that “[r]eligions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail.” I do not know which planet Crane is living on, but on this planet no religion has ever failed because its historical claims have been demonstrated to be false. Christianity has survived for nearly 2000 years despite the fact that many of its historical claims have been shown to be untrue, or at least not possible within the known laws of the physical universe—most notably the claims of the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. Judaism has survived even longer in the face of patently false claims such as the one that God promised the Land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and Judaism has survived notwithstanding (and perhaps even because of) all the blood that has been shed in pursuit of this claim. Both Christianity and Judaism suffer from the lack of historicity of much of the so-called “historical” material in the Old Testament. “Secular” historians and archaeologists can find no evidence whatsoever outside the Old Testament for the existence of a King David, the fall of Jericho, the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, and a host of other historical claims found in the Old Testament. In fact, they have found evidence that many of these events could not have happened as they are described in the Old Testament. As with evidence, history is a matter of convenience to the believer. History is invoked whenever it is convenient to do so (as is the case with Jewish claims regarding Jewish "ownership" of the land of Palestine).

There is much else that is wrong with Crane’s article, and it is impossible to disentangle all his various errors from his few statements of truth in this response (several readers of the article commented on some of these in the NYT). However, if Crane really wants to talk about the differences between science and religion, he should be talking about the following:

(1) Each religion claims that it is the sole repository of the truth and that all other religions are false. Science knows no such “jingoism.” There are no “brands” of science each vying for supremacy. The various disciplines of science cooperate with each other and do not see other disciplines as rivals. The physicist’s view of the world is not pitted against the chemist’s or the biologist’s. They complement each other. But where would you find a religionist who would admit that Islam complements Christianity or Buddhism complements Judaism?

(2) Religions are, typically, intolerant of other religions and seek to suppress them through aggressive means. Just consider the number of wars that have been fought in the name of religion, and the amount of human blood that has been spilled. No war that I am aware of has ever been fought over a scientific principle or theory.

(3) Religions do not allow internal dissent and freedom of expression. Anyone who challenges the orthodox position (that is, “toe the party line”) is immediately branded a heretic and burned at the stake or otherwise “neutralized.” This is not just confined to the Middle Ages. In our own time, the Catholic Church silenced (with a heavy hand) the voice of Liberation Theology, a movement that arose within the Church in Latin America, largely through the overzealous efforts of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). In sharp contrast, science welcomes dissent, for it is in dissent that we arrive at a closer approximation to the truth about the world around us. A prime example is Einstein’s successful challenge of Newtonian orthodoxy and Darwin’s challenge of the notion of the fixity of species. Another more recent example is what has come to be known, somewhat facetiously, as the “Black Hole War.” In 1983, Stephen Hawking argued (convincingly) that black holes evaporate and that the information they contain evaporates along with them and is thus lost forever. Coming from one so eminent in scientific circles as Hawking, this view might have been considered “scientific orthodoxy.” However, over the next few years, Leonard Susskind offered a dissenting view and was able to prove (more convincingly) that Hawking was mistaken. Hawking very graciously admitted that he was wrong and the business of science went on without further ado, incorporating Susskind’s new insights. Such collegiality is unimaginable among religions. As recently as 2007, Benedict XVI issued a statement that the Catholic Church considers itself the only true Church (and, by extension, that Catholicism is the only true religion). Do we need to mention his remarks about Islam, which offended millions of Muslims all over the world? Do we need to mention how reluctant he was to admit the Church’s culpability in handling sexually abusive priests? Benedict XVI would not survive for a day as an ordinary scientist, let alone as the head of a major scientific institution, yet he seems to be doing quite well in his current position as head of the world's largest Christian denomination.

(4) As already mentioned above, religion is not particularly concerned with intellectual honesty. It is the prime example of “selective attention,” picking and choosing whatever is in its best interests, and suppressing anything that poses a threat to these interests, through bans and prohibitions and taboos. Science has no vested interest in any particular scientific theory or idea, and scientific bans and prohibitions are unheard of (at least in contemporary science). Science embraces all evidence, especially evidence that runs counter to existing theories and generally accepted explanations. For scientists, this contrary evidence is the most exciting aspect of the scientific endeavour, for it leads to new breakthroughs and a new understanding of the world.

These are but a few of the genuinely important differences between science and religion. The ones that Crane mentions in his article are mere pablum—not worthy of intellectually rigorous discourse. As I see it, Crane’s article is symptomatic of the currently fashionable practice of valuing everything and not being “judgmental.” This approach does nothing to further the cause of understanding the way believers think: it succeeds only in scrounging up the lamest excuses for their closed-mindedness and lack of intellectual honesty. I don’t think atheists suffer from a lack of understanding of believers. After all, most atheists in the West were brought up within the Judaeo-Christian tradition and are only too familiar with the way believers think. They once thought in exactly the same way themselves, but were somehow able to bootstrap themselves out of the mire of religious belief. The only way to engage believers (if we want to engage them at all) is to show them that we do not buy into the delusions that they have allowed themselves to be taken in by. I speak here of the West rather than of Third World countries, where there is really no way out of the mire in the absence of education, freedom of speech, or easy access to the body of knowledge that humans have accumulated so far.

In its namby-pamby, softly-softly, let’s-be-understanding approach, Crane’s article is a prime example of the art of calling a spade “a certain garden implement.” Where would be world be today if reformers such as Martin Luther had adopted Crane’s attitude? Luther certainly knew how to call a spade a spade, and he changed the course of Western history precisely because he did not balk at doing so. We need more people like him today and less of the Crane variety.