Star Simpson (picture), the MIT student who was arrested on Sept. 21 at Logan Airport for wearing a circuit board on her sweatshirt (story), went to high school at HPA with my son Ko.

She’s clearly a brilliant student and athlete, but maybe not such a great web designer, judging by her MIT home page (now offline, but still available in Google’s cache).

To set the record straight, technically it was not a printed circuit board but rather a “prototyping board”, as pointed out in this fellow MIT student’s blog. OK, thanks for the clarification.

Bob and Sakiko’s new home is the Amestoy house, built in 1906 by John B. Amestoy (picture), member of a well-known pioneer family who owned the Rancho Encino in the San Fernando Valley, now the city of Encino.

The architect for the house was Samuel Tilden Norton, an early Jewish resident of LA, who designed a number of buildings across LA in the early 1900s, including the Greek Theatre.

The house is in the Colonial Revival style, specifically the “foursquare” variant, with a high-pitched roof, narrow clapboard siding, wood molding at the ceiling level throughout the house, and paneled front door.

An Assessor’s report from 1915 reports a single two-story residence with brick foundation, nine plumbing features, ornamental buffet, fireplace, and barn. The 3,285 sq. ft. structure included four living rooms and kitchen on the first floor and five bedrooms and bathroom on the second, with “three wooden floors”.

The house maintains its original floor plan as well as those original wooden floors, which although now refinished still bear the scars of decades of use, including a period as boarding house. It was extensively restored by Ed Sutton, the owner from 2000-2004, and the house is still known as “Ed’s House” by the locals.

The Amestoy house is located in the Harvard Heights neighborhood of LA on the hills southwest of downtown, near Western and Venice, and lies within the Harvard Heights Historical Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ), just south of Koreatown. Originally a middle-class streetcar suburb with a Greek flavor, the area evolved a more inner-city character after the War. Starting in the 90s a gradual gentrification process began; this block of S. Hobart Blvd. is now sprinkled with well-restored houses, the Amestoy house among them.

A first-edition Book of Mormon recently sold for $105,000 at auction (NYT). What better time to revisit the question of how the Book of Mormon was said to have been translated, and whether the story makes sense in light of what we know 180 years later.

In Mormon 9:31-34, we find:

And now behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge in the characters, which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in the Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in the Hebrew, behold, ye would have had none imperfection in our record.

Reformed Egyptian was apparently a form of hieroglyphics. Let’s assume that somehow this language was indeed learned, preserved, and passed down among the Nephites and their descendants. What’s interesting is the next assertion—that records were kept in hieroglyphics because it was more compact. It’s a natural assumption for a linguistic newbie like Joseph Smith to make: those Egyptians can write whole concepts in single characters! What better way to save on page space!

Information theory teaches us otherwise. The number of bits of information in a message is roughly equivalent whether expressed in English or Chinese. The space occupied by the encoding is also roughly the same. Modern-day translators between Japanese and English know that the “byte count” of a Japanese original and English translation are almost exactly the same (where a Sino-Japanese character is counted as two bytes, and does in fact occupy approximately twice as much space on the page as an English letter, counted as one byte).

The alleged space savings from ideographic or hieroglyphic writing systems are also fatally compromised by the need to use them phonetically to spell out names and words for which no character has been defined. For instance, there was certainly no hieroglyphic in “reformed Egyptian” for “Nephi”, so we can assume it was written using at least two full hieroglyphic characters for their phonetic value—with the same holding for the vast array of proper names found in the Book of Mormon.

In other words, the assertion that hieroglyphics save space, as made in the Book of Mormon, clearly identifies the writer as someone who had probably never encountered any foreign language whatsoever, much less one written in an ideographic system.

The second implication in the passage quoted above—that if there had been enough space to write in Hebrew then the record would have contained no imperfections—is also puzzling. Is the point that reformed Egyptian is inherently less precise or more vulnerable to error, something modern linguistics would refute? Or that the writers and abridgers of the BOM didn’t know reformed Egyptian as well as they knew Hebrew, which also seems unlikely, if this language had been how records were kept across generations? Most likely, what we have here is another incorrect assumption by someone who knew nothing about languages or writing systems: that hieroglyphic systems by their very nature must be less precise and prone to error than “real” writing systems which use letters and words.

Let’s now turn to the actual process of translation. David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, decribed it as follows:

Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English.

The fundamental misunderstanding of how hieroglyphic languages work is once again apparent. Assuming the semantic value of a hieroglyphic is approximately the same as that of a Chinese character, the sequence of “interpretations” of the individual characters might be something like the following for the first sentence in the Book of Mormon which starts “I, Nephi:”

I Nephi good parents born from, reason father knowledge received somewhat, also many day path along suffering seeing…

Joseph Smith could not possibly have gotten from this to fluent English, at least not without an intricate knowledge of Egyptian grammar. On the other hand, if God had actually presented him with fully-formed English sentences to be read off directly from within the hat like a teleprompter, there is no way this could be consistent with the description of one character being presented at a time.

Joseph Smith’s mistaken notion of hieroglyphics now becomes somewhat clearer. He apparently assumed that each character encapsulated not a single sememe or concept, but an entire phrase, such as “having been born of goodly parent”. Even if that were possible, the order of the phrases in the original would still not have been the same as in English, requiring a re-ordering process unaccounted for in the description above.

Martin Harris, another of the three witnesses, is reported to have described a much different translation process, as quoted by George Reynolds from a letter written to the Deseret News by Edward Stevenson, in “Myth of the Manuscript Found”, Juvenile Instructor Office, 1883 edition, page 91:

Martin explained the translation as follows: By aid of the seer stone, sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by Martin, and when finished he would say, “Written,” and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place, but if not written correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used.’

Whether it was characters appearing one-by-one in the hat with the English “interpretation” below, or fully-formed sentences, one is puzzled by what the role of the actual plates was in this whole process—were they sitting on a table in the corner of the room? Were they ever actually consulted? If God could place the characters or sentences in the hat, like some early 19th century PowerPoint presentation, why was it even necessary to give Joseph the physical plates and then whisk them away later? For that matter, why was it even necessary to go through the laborious character-by-character process followed by transcription, when God could have simply written out the translation in longhand Himself on a pad of paper, or even just delivered the completed English manuscript?

There are yet other accounts of exactly how the hat and stone worked. Orson Hyde, an early apostle, claimed that:

These two stones, called Urim and Thummim, in diameter the size of an English crown (coin) only a little thicker, were placed where all light was excluded. The persons using these offered their prayers to the Lord, and the answer became visible, written in letters of light on the Urim and Thummim, but disappeared again soon after.

This gets trickier and trickier. The amount of text that could be written on a coin 50mm (.2”) in diameter, even in the smallest type, would be between one and two words, sort of like a Magic Eight Ball. Joseph Smith would have to have read these words off the coin quickly before they disappeared. Did the Urim and Thummim have a “Back” button in case he missed one?

Joseph Fielding Smith, later the sixth president of the church, was recorded by Oliver B. Huntington in his journal as having confirmed at a 1881 stake conference that the entire translation was letter-perfect:

Joseph did not render the writing on the gold plates into the English language in his own style of language as many people believe, but every word and every letter was given to him by the gift and power of God. So it is the work of God and not of Joseph Smith, and it was done in this way…The Lord caused each word spelled as it is in the book to appear on the stones in short sentences or words, and when Joseph had uttered the sentence or word before him and the scribe had written it properly, that sentence would disappear and another appear. And if there was a word wrongly written or even a letter incorrect the writing on the stones would remain there. Then Joseph would require the scribe to spell the reading of the last spoken and thus find the mistake and when corrected the sentence would disappear as usual.

We again see the confusion between characters, words, short sentences, and long sentences. If they were “short sentences”, how did these combine into the longer sentences in the actual translated work? If they were sentences, even short ones, how could they have fit on stones the size of the Urim and Thummin?

The position of the church, or of its leaders, underwent a 180 degree change when it became apparent that the BOM contained many simple spelling and grammatical errors of exactly the sort that an uneducated man such as Joseph Smith might have made. BH Roberts, the Mormon historian, stated:

It is impossible that the alleged translation, whether by divine or human media, could be a word-for-word bringing over from the Nephite language into the English…If the Book of Mormon is a real translation instead of a word-for-word bringing over from one language into another, and it is insisted that the divine instrument, Urim and Thummim, did all, and the prophet nothing—at least nothing more than to read off the translation made by Urim and Thummim—then the divine instrument is responsible for such errors in grammar and diction as did occur. But this is to assign responsibility for errors in language to a divine instrumentality, which amounts to assigning such error to God. But that is unthinkable, not to say blasphemous…that old theory cannot be successfully maintained; that is, the Urim and Thummim did the translating, the Prophet, nothing beyond repeating what he saw reflected in that instrument; that God directly or indirectly is responsible for the verbal and grammatical errors of translation. To advance such a theory before intelligent and educated people is to unnecessarily invite ridicule, and make of those who advocate it candidates for contempt …

It certainly does. But that is precisely the theory put forth by the earlier church fathers, which Roberts lamely blames on the fact that “our fathers and our people in the past and now were and are uncritical.” But this is not a matter of being uncritical or not. Those “theories” were explicit statements of how the translation process worked by people who were there at the time, and later prophet seers and revelators.

The conclusion is inescapable: the entire description of how the Book of Mormon was translated reveals nothing more or less than the utter linguistic ignorance of those giving the descriptions, and the linguistic gullibility of those believing them.

Japan has inexplicably decided to experiment with copying one of the worst aspects of the American legal system: juries.

As reported in the NYT earlier this month, the new system, to be introduced in 2009, involves citizens called “saiban-in” (“lay assessors”) who will sit on panels together with judges on the more serious cases.

According to the article, “a jury is one of the most important protections of a democracy.” Really? A random group of biased, cherrypicked, uneducated people off the street are going to decide on matters of life and death? For every high-profile case where the jury obviously got it wrong, how many hundreds or thousands do we never hear of?

The Supreme Court recently ruled that it was OK for relatives of a murder victim to sit in court with big buttons featuring the face of the deceased, and that this did not unduly influence the jury. (Carey vs. Musladin.) Maybe or maybe not. But this case raises the deeper issue of how we can possibly know what does or does not influence a jury. Do they really get “innocent until proven guilty”, or even “beyond a reasonable doubt”? I doubt it.

The Founders were quite certain that the jury system was important. After all, they wrote it into the Bill of Rights not once, not twice, but three times. But let’s remember: they were reacting to very particular abuses of the judicial system under colonial English rule. Juries were the only way to absolutely prevent such misuse of government power. And recall, the jurors back then were landed and educated.

There’s no need for a jury system in America today. We call up people with no expertise whatsoever and waste their time to help us condemn one of our underclass to prison for a decade for possessing a rock of cocaine.

There are those who say juries form a key part of the democratic system. The author of the NYT article goes so far as to say “if Japan’s effort to introduce a jury system fails, democracy movements elsewhere in Asia will suffer a serious setback.” But representational democracy and the jury system are similar only in the superficial sense that they involve citizen participation.

The article goes on to say that “it’s hard to imagine how Americans could fulfill their role as democracy advocates any better than by helping the Japanese become jurors.” Well, I don’t think the Japanese need any lessons from us in democracy. If we really wanted to help them become more democratic, why not push for a nationwide referendum on the US troops in Okinawa and elsehwere in Japan, then insist that the two governments actually abide by the results?

I’m having huge fun reading Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience. These are the Gifford lectures (website) he gave in 1985. Even after more than two decades, this is one of the most cogent, engaging, lucid, approachable, modest, insightful, and encompassing approaches I have seen to the science vs. religion debate.

He summarizes the key neurotheological issues far better than I could ever hope to:

People have religious experiences. No question about it. They have them world-wide, and there are some interesting similarities in the religious experiences tha are had worldwoide. They are powerful, emotionally extremely convincing, and they often lead to people reforming their lives and doing good works, although the opposite also happens…But the question is, can any such experience provide other than anecdotal evidence of the existence of God or gods? … Large numbers of people can have experiences that can be profound and movnig and still not correspond to anything like an exact sense of external reality.

I note also that religious experiences can be brought on by specific molecules. There are many cultures that consciously imbibe or ingest these molecules in order to bring on a religious experience. It’s a very long list of materials. This suggests that there is some molecular basis for the religious experience and that it need not correspond to some external reality.

Let’s say there’s a molecule that produces a religious experience, whatever the religious experience is. How does that come about? Virtually every time someone takes that molecule, he or she has a religious experience. Does that not suggest that there is a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? What could that molecule be like? Let’s give it a name, since nobody’s discovered it yet, and of course it may not exist—let’s call it “theophorin”.

What could the selective advantage of a theophorin be? How would it come about? Why would it be there? Well, what is the nature of the experience? The nature of the experience has, as I say, many different aspects. But one uniform aspect of it is an intense feeling of awe and humility before a power vastly greater than ourselves. And that sounds to me very much like a dominance-hierarchy molecule or part of a suite of molecules whose funcdtion it is to fit us into the dominance hierarchives.

I think there is as much difference between the religious experience and the bureaucratic religions as there is, say, between sex with love and sex without love. And of course humans have added something profound and beautiful in both cases to the molecular reflex. Perhaps this account will sound tasteless or unpalatable to many, and if so I apologize. But if we treat the question of the origin of religion and the religious experience as a scientific question, then we must ask, “What essential aspects of the religious experience are left out by this hypothesis?” and note that it is at least in principle testable by finding the theophorin, and you could then of course see a large number of controlled experiments to test that out in great detail.

I called Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” a “critically insightful” book. Now Sam has come up with a slight volume titled Letter to a Christian Nation.

The book has a bit of an identity crisis, however. The title would indicate he’s addressing Christians, but actually, as Sam himself says, it’s meant to “arm secularists”. As a result, the book has a preaching-to-the-choir flavor. But it’s interesting to consider: what is the long-term process by which the world can be brought to stop believing in magic? In particular, is it through arguments? I doubt it. The people on either side of this divide are talking different languages.

First, we need to separate the biological and cultural tendencies towards religion. It’s widely accepted—and the premise of this blog—that religion has a heavy biological component. To the extent it does, only evolution can address that problem. But it is not biology that compels people to believe that Mary was a virgin or that poverty-stricken Africans should be taught abstinence. We can accept that we will continue to have biological tendencies that leave us in awe of the unknown, or govern the neural processes associated with personal development, while still attempting to address the culturally-dependent aspects of religion which are causing people to kill each other, among other things.

So let us draw a roadmap for achieving a society where people no longer believe in counter-productive, harmful, and obviously stupid things. Given the arc of human civilization, I suggest this roadmap needs to extend over a century or more. Such a roadmap will alert us to what needs to be done now to promote the process.

A key element is the teaching of religion to children. This was highlighted by Dawkins in The God Delusion as well as by Sam in his new book. Although there is a natural attrition away from religion even among children of religious parents (rather extreme in my family’s case, where by my count only two of eight children maintain their parents’ beliefs), it probably averages less than 25%. Those that have discarded magical beliefs, however, are unlikely to have even one child who reverts to them. The issue, then, becomes the ratio at which religious belief decays. If it is 25% per generation, over a century the number of believers would be reduced by only 60%. If, however, the attrition ratio could be raised to 50% per generation, the number of believers a hundred years later would be reduced to a manageable 10%. But how can we bring one out of two people per generation into the ranks of the “brights”?

Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris appear to believe that the right approach is to talk real loud and take no prisoners. However, as mentioned above, that is unlikely to work.

We need a more sophisticated approach. We need to manage the conversation in a way which resonates with those we are addressing. We need to control the terms of the discussion. We need to establish simple, compelling themes which will resonate. A large part of this is semiological in nature—what are the words and messages which we want to create and disseminate?

For instance, consider the message “God does not exist.” We can embellish this message with all kinds of details, as Dawkins does, rebutting each and every argument that He might in fact exist. But the believers will simply tune this out. We need a message which, jujitsu-like, take advantage of the gullibility and proclivity to believe on the part of those we are trying to address.

I like messages of the form “God is X.” Such messages start off by accepting the premise that God does in fact exist. helping to guarantee their acceptance.

For instance, take “God is mean”. This leverages the nagging feeling shared by everyone that there is something a little bit wrong about a God that lets Katrina happen, that lets babies die, that watches over planes smashing into skyskrapers, and basically fucks all of us over more than we care to admit. It can’t be sugar-coated. Let’s spread this meme, gently.

Another example is “God is too busy”. Let’s face it—worrying about six billion souls is just too much work for One Guy. And that’s even before you think about the 10^23 other stars in the universe he has to worry about, a point made brilliantly by Carl Sagan in “Varieties of Scientific Experience”, which I’ll review in the near future. He’s so busy, he’s probably not really taking care of me like He should be, or listening really closely to my prayers.

Then we could go with “God is not that smart.” I mean, look at all the mistakes He’s made. We know he created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib, but let’s face it, in the physiological design department we can’t exactly give Him an “A”. Just ask my knee doctor, who says one of these days I’m going to need a replacement.

Let’s spread these memes, focusing on them with laser intensity and refusing to dilute our message. As they spread and gain credence through society, people will not suddenly switch sides and start disbelieving—they will just stop caring about a God who is mean, too busy, and not that smart. That can get us to the 50% attrition per generation level and reduce believers to 10% of the current level over the next hundred years, at which point they will be nothing more than a minor nuisance.

Truth Unfolding: an annotated translation of Dogen Zenji’s Genjo Koan (PDF, 180KB)

I’m pleased to present a new annotated English translation of Genjo Koan, Dogen’s definitive, elegant exposition of the importance of practice, one of his primary themes. Dogen was the 13th century Japanese Zen master who launched the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in Japan and penned Shobogenzo, a collection of nearly a hundred essays renowned for their power, clarity and poetic beauty.

The intent is to provide an accessible introduction to Dogen’s writings for the English reader. This objective governed the translation policy, and the nature of the commentary.

The translation approach taken was to emphasize accessibility and readability, while maintaining the greatest possible fidelity to the original. Dogen presents formidable challenges to the translator. He wrote in a medieval Japanese with unfamiliar syntax and vocabulary. His writings are sprinkled with innovative stylistic devices he used to drive home his message. And the concepts he is conveying can at times seem very opaque.

Soto Zen has taken firm root in the West over the last three decades. This has been accompanied by half a dozen or more English translations of all or part of Shobogenzo. These translations are the fruits of the labor of esteemed Zen masters and scholars. Still, there is ample room for new translations with new insights. The density and interrelatedness of Dogen’s writings means that each hour or day or week or month spent pondering a phrase or sentence or paragraph can add value to the enterprise of rendering Dogen into an English which accurately conveys his meaning and style. This translation is yet another such effort.

The concept of fidelity operates on many levels. One such level is vocabulary, which is mapped precisely here, even in cases where this requires the use of unfamiliar words or Buddhist technical terms, which are then explained in the notes. Examples include both Chinese Buddhist terms which are mapped back to their Sanskrit equivalents, such as dharma, as well as native Japanese words such as satori. A second level is style, which is mirrored in these translations to the absolute extent possible. For instance, repetitions which might not usually be found in English are carried though. Where Dogen omits a word it is omitted in the English as well. If Dogen is in a lyrical or poetic mode, that should be mirrored in the translation as well.

One level which is not mapped religiously, on the other hand, is that of Japanese syntax, the mechanical mimicking of which simply yields wooden, awkward English. Japanese is Japanese and English is English. Assuming that the original Japanese was accessible and readable, which in the case of Dogen it certainly was, an “accurate” translation should replicate that accessibility and readability in English.

The most important question in terms of fidelity is meaning. Ideally, if the words and syntax and style are carried through to English, the meaning will follow. Even if the original is ambiguous, or even if it has multiple meanings as is sometimes the case in Dogen, a skillful translation can reproduce that same ambiguity or multiplicity of meanings. There are times, however, when circumstances force the translator into a particular interpretation. In that case, it’s important to take full advantage of every available clue, including syntactic details, character usage, and, notably, the relationship to preceding and succeeding sections—in other words, the flow. What should not factor into the interpretation is the translator’s preconceived notions of what Dogen “must have been talking about.”

Another major source of insight in interpreting Dogen is the extensive body of translations available both in Japanese and English, as well as commentaries, mostly in Japanese. There are, however, limits to their usefulness. Some translators have laudably taken it upon themselves to translate large volumes of Dogen’s writings, such as Shobogenzo in its entirety, which reduces the amount of time they can spend on any given essay. In other cases, apparent mistakes in interpretation are propagated from one commentator or translator to another. In any case, in addition to referring extensively to preceding translations and commentaries, we present those alternative translations to the reader (in the form of footnotes to avoid disrupting the flow of the notes), less to criticize potentially misleading translations as to give the reader the opportunity to draw her own conclusions. Given that objective, attributions to specific translators are often omitted, since the intent is not a scholarly review of previous translations.

Finally, to make Dogen more accessible to those getting to know him for the first time, the decision was made to accompany the translation with extensive translator’s notes. The annotations are not in general meant to elucidate the essay’s deeper meaning. Dogen can speak for himself if only given the voice to do so. Rather, the focus is on pointing out interesting or challenging aspects of Dogen’s prose and possible alternatives for interpret-ing or translating it. This opportunity to clarify aspects of Dogen’s writings in the notes makes it possible for the translation itself to adhere more closely to the original. The annotations also present historical and cultural background to enhance the reader’s understanding. The translated essay is first given by itself, to avoid distracting the reader with the annotations. The translations are then repeated, this time interspersed with translator‘s notes. Perhaps the reader will find it useful to read the stand-alone version, then the annotated version, and finally return to the stand-alone version to experience something akin to what readers and listeners in the 13th century did.

This translation supercedes my earlier attempts, including “Unfolding Puzzle.” I welcome comments and criticisms.

[Picture is of an “ojo de dios” by Jay Mohler.]

TIME magazine had an immensely stupid article called “God vs. Science” on the cover of its Nov. 13, 2006 issue. They couldn’t even decide who the combatants were in this supposed duel. Right off the bat, they confuse science with “Darwinism” and religion with “God”. Then they make the ludicrous suggestion that science might not be able to “withstand the criticisms” of Christians.

The article does make the somewhat useful point, however, that the “debate” may be becoming more polarized (as in my opinion it should), although there are also now more “informed conciliators”, by which Time apparently means people who believe in magic but have letters like PhD after their names.

Unfortunately, Time chose not to actually report further on the subject—which encompasses minor topics such as, oh, how a scientific explanation of religious belief and experience could affect the history of the world, including Islamic terrorism. Instead, it printed a painful dialog between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins (Wikipedia), eminent genome decoder and devout Christian.

Painful because of how stupid Collins sounds. He starts off by rolling out the tired old theory about God setting the machine in motion, “activating evolution” at the moment of creation of the universe (or at least all parts of it other than Himself), but in this contorted version apparently having foreknowledge of everything including the ridiculous discussion itself. Somehow, this is supposed to reconcile God’s omniscience with free will. Of course, God didn’t want to make things too easy for us, so he hid all the clues to His existence—which is why Dawkins can’t see them! God tweaked the universal physical constants so we could exist (what were they set to before?). The existence of God satisifies Occam’s razor, since it’s such a simple explanation—God made everything! Collins accuses Dawkins of holding an “impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as ‘Is there a God?’”. But if by this he means Dawkins thinks such questions are invalid, he’s just wrong. Of course Dawkins’s view is that humans can ask such questions. He simply answers them in the negative.

But wait! Collins now zigzags and says God, instead of being the Guy that sets up the model train layout and twiddles the knobs, is actually “something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.” But if that were the case, how could we understand Him fiddling with the gravitational constant or setting evolution in motion? And then suddenly he has God not just setting things up at the beginning, but micromanaging miracles like the virgin birth, because “it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so.” Collins is also apparently ignorant of all the recent research on human ethics and altruism, continuing to flog the old notion that only God can make us ethical.

Collins concludes:

…there are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

So now, finally, God is reduced to the concept of all the Unknown Stuff Out There. And it doesn’t compromise Collins’ ability to think rigorously that he believes in the resurrection (but not, of course, in the creation story in Genesis; which he says cannot be interpreted “narrowly”, was not “intended as a science textbook”, and is actually “very consistent with the Big Bang”).

Collins asserts that God provides the answer to the “why” questions, presumably of the “why are we here” variety. But he never explains what those answers are, how there could be such answers, or what the nature of those answers might be.

Collins should have followed the advice he quotes St. Augustine as giving, warning against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If he had, he would have skipped this whole discussion. That would have let Time do what it should have in the first place, which is to actually report on the issue.

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge is B. Alan Wallace’s new book. It’s packed full of challenging insights.

For instance, I hadn’t realized that:

• It was scientific materialism that was responsible for the death of millions of people under Hitler, Mao and Stalin.

• Scientists, the majority of whom are materialists and reductionists, adamantly refuse to consider the life of the mind. (The broad-ranging field of psychology apparently doesn’t count. Anyway, a lot of psychologists used to be behavioralists a long time ago.)

• Scientists don’t know the first thing about reality because they don’t even know what consciousness is. (Just like medieval scientists also could not explain “vapors” and “humors” and the “ether”.)

• Scientific materialism strips our lives of meaning.

• It also removes our free will. (And that’s one thing I insist on having.)

• It undermines our sense of moral responsibility.

• The more progress is made in physics, the more it proves we don’t know anything at all.

• The fact that this scientific materialism stuff just doesn’t cut it is proved by the 80% of Americans that believe in ghosts and virgin births.

• Voters supported Bush in 2004 because of his moral values, and not Kerry because he appeared to “stand for so little”.

• But still, we need to find a “fresh, integrative perspective” to reconcile these two “traditions”, even though “scientific materialism is a modern kind of nature religion or neoanimism, whic had innumerable precedents int he preliterate history of humanity”.

• The First Amendment’s establishment clause has been interpreted in an overly broad way by generations of judges.

And all that’s only from one chapter. Maybe elsewhere in the book there’s some good stuff about Buddhism, since that’s in the book’s subtitle? Sorry. We find nothing more than a mind-numbing, academic analysis of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, that has nothing to do with neuroscience or science of any kind. (This chapter, like most (all?) of the others, apparently was cut-and-pasted from some earlier publication to fill out page count.) Maybe we’ll find out something about Zen and neuroscience? Sorry. Zen is not mentioned in the book once. Maybe we’ll learn about lots of neuroscientific research into meditation? Sorry. Wallace barely mentions the names of leading researchers and doesn’t even bother to summarize their results. Richard Davidson appears just once, in a parenthetical reference claiming that his work “shows that the idol of the brain has been toppled by empirical evidence.” Crick and Koch are brought up only to blithely accuse them of reducing consciousness to whatever science has the abililty to study, even as Wallace claims that scientists refuse to study consciousness. Perhaps we will learn about scientific theories of reincarnation memories? Sorry. We’re left with a couple of references to studies of kids who remembered past lives.

There is much that is simply stupid in this book, repetitive, superficial, or irrelevant. What is not stupid is basically wrong or at best wildly misinformed. Overall, one gets the impression that Wallace would rather be living in medieval Tibet than 21st century America; back then, there were no evil scientists and no pesky walls between the secular and spiritual.

Bob and Sakiko got married on Tuesday, November 14, 2006.