Belief and reason
The introduction to your God issue is wrong in saying that “religious belief is ingrained in human nature” (17 March, p 37). Rather, curiosity is ingrained in human nature.
The problem is that we reply to a child’s early “why?” questions with easy, but wrong, answers. We answer children’s quest for the so-called causal agents in the same way as our ancient tribal leaders would have done: “Why is there thunder?” “Because the gods are angry.” It is this, repeated each generation, which perpetuated simple religions.
Scientists can believe in God. However, they must not incorporate God into their scientific explanations. A firewall must separate those two domains.
Scientists studying religion do not cross that firewall, but it may not be perceived that way by the religious community – rather as an invasion. Tread carefully.
With the article “Born believers” you printed a useful table that details the number of people who adhere to the major faiths (17 March, p 38). In the same way that you might choose a washing machine, could you make a list of pros and cons and logically choose a religion to follow? One major con might be the numbers slaughtered throughout the ages in the cause of a specific religion.
Sadly, I did not achieve enlightenment from your issue on religion. Should the enquiry not be broadened to include all beliefs and believing, rather than limiting it to the subset of religious belief?
The dynamics of behaviour are the same, even when the destructive cult is Maoism or monetarism. Like ducklings, we tend to imprint on the first idea that grabs our attention.
Sixty years of replication support social psychologist Leon Festinger’s finding that evidence that upsets an imprinted idea causes “cognitive dissonance” and is often sternly resisted. The full weight of one’s intellect will be applied to support the stupidity of an idiotic belief, whether it be religious, political or any other manifestation of tribalism.
Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, UK
Science has made amazing inroads in answering many questions about our universe, such as when it began, how it functions and what it consists of. But until scientists can answer “why”, we will have religions.
Your observation that religious people distrust atheists more than they distrust devotees of other religions (17 March, p 42) reminds me of the similarities between religion and sport.
I believe that supporters of (say) a football team are better disposed towards supporters of rival teams than towards people who don’t care about football.
Living in Melbourne and not supporting a football team makes me feel like an atheist twice over.
Victor Stenger argues that the existence of God should be considered a scientific hypothesis and that we should “look for the empirical evidence that would follow” (17 March, p 46).
Traditionally, God has been seen as omnipotent (maximally powerful) and hence, if He exists, would be capable of thwarting any experiment to detect Him.
Stenger confidently states that prayers have not been shown to have been answered. For some time now, I have been praying for other people’s prayers not to be answered. Could this explain these findings?
No mention was made in your God issue of instances when religion or supernatural belief is not innate. I feel I have never had any faith. Some feel that they simply do not have the capacity to believe, never have and never will – this is not a case of scientific training suppressing instinct.
This leads me to suspect that the reactions of the infants discussed in “Born believers” (17 March, p 38) are not especially sound evidence for the propensity to believe in the supernatural or “have faith”.
• Justin L. Barrett tackles this in his book, though he says “this is an area needing much more scholarly and scientific attention”.
Changing ageing
David Bainbridge, offering a new perspective on middle age, seems to assume that women’s fertility will continue to shut down in the fifth decade, and that this will in future liberate women for the rest of their lives (10 March, p 48).
There are some grounds for this. In Thailand, the menopause turns a woman into an honorary man and this is celebrated with a feast. But is this shutdown unalterably programmed? Over the past 20 years, the accepted period of childbearing in the west has lengthened. It is true that teenage pregnancies have declined, but late pregnancies have risen. An Indian woman has given birth aged 70. In Europe there have been several births to sexagenarians.
Egg freezing and donations from relatives are only some of the approaches being explored to slow the ticking of the biological clock. What would happen if this access to fertility were extended widely instead of to the elite?
Ageing, whether viewed as decay or ripening, might cease to be a stately progression. Its present stages might be subject to unforeseeable expansions, contractions and mutations.
If long periods of infertility are integral to cultural evolution, we might lose out if scientific advance, propelled by the best of intentions, removes them.
The whoops particle
It is probably just as well that creating inflaton particles is so resoundingly out of our reach (17 March, p 32).
Those things, linked to the early expansion of the universe, are capable of making something inflate by a factor of about 1050 in only 10-33 of a second, to the likely detriment of everything else.
Ancient black hole
In his letter, Brian Bonney raises the question of just how big black holes can get (25 February, p 36). If there is an infinite number of universes, then it might be expected that there will be an infinite number that are home to big bangs, star formation, star death and black holes.
Hawking radiation is proposed as a mechanism for black holes to lose mass, but their propensity for swallowing other bodies may result in a net increase in mass as they wander through a multiverse occupied by universes like ours. They may even have done so before our big bang, which would explain the apparent early appearance of black holes in our universe (15 October 2011, p 18).
Marcus Chown writes:
• I have written about the idea of black holes surviving from a previous universe (20 August 2011, p 38). But, as for black holes swallowing others from other universes, such universes are usually “causally unconnected”.
Always approximate
Marcus Chown states that “all the wormholes envisioned… assume that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct. In fact, this is unlikely to be the case” (10 March, p 40).
The article goes on to state that “many researchers believe that Einstein’s theory of gravity must be an approximation of a deeper theory”.
Can we please have more of the second type of statement when discussing scientific progress? Climate change sceptics love to point out that science is “always realising that it got it wrong” or that “theories that all scientists used to believe in are always being overturned”.
In fact, what has happened in many cases is that what was once seen as a law is later considered an approximation. Thus Kepler realised that Copernicus was only approximately right about the Earth’s orbit, a theory later refined by Newton.
Similarly, Einstein realised that Newtonian physics was only an approximation and now the same is happening to his work.
Colour spaces
Michael Brooks poses the puzzle of identifying the three dimensions of the modern-looking “colour space” in Bishop Grosseteste’s 13th-century colour theory (10 March, p 52). Two, named in Latin, seem fairly straightforward. The scale running from clara to obscura seems likely to correspond to saturation, while the scale from purum to impurum could well be brightness.
The more puzzling scale is the third one, from pauca (few) to multa (many). But if his three dimensions correspond to what we now call HSB (hue, saturation and brightness) then this third scale should somehow relate to hue. But given that it runs, combined with the other two, from black to white without any specific colour distinctions, it is not immediately obvious how.
The answer may be provided by the diagonal from black to white in the RGB (red, green, blue) colour space illustrated in the article. If these, the primary colours of light, are slowly turned up together, so to speak, the effect is to gradually brighten towards the white created when they mix. When all (or most of) the colours are switched off, there are in a sense few (or no) colours there, whereas when they are all on, there are many colours there. The pauca to multa dimension could be an RGB-style colour mixer: perhaps stained-glass windows provided inspiration.
If so, Bishop Grosseteste had invented a hybrid RGB/HSB colour space in the 13th century. A remarkable feat, and one that, as the article says, revises our view of the Middle Ages.
For the record
• We should not have implied that Quentin Atkinson believes that “overcrowding in the Horn of Africa” may have pushed the L3 mitochondrial lineage group of humans to migrate out of Africa, nor that his study supports the idea that environmental stability was a factor (24 March, p 40). What he does argue is that a cultural innovation may have given some groups with high L3 frequencies an advantage ().
• Arctic Fibre wishes to make it clear that it has no plans to drill any tunnel 40 metres deep across the Boothia isthmus or anywhere else: the plan is to lay cable in a trench not more than 1 metre deep, or in bedrock in a groove not more than 15 centimetres deep – contrary to our report (17 March, p 19).