Any religious argument based on expertise in a language is necessarily unconvincing to someone who doesn’t already consider that language to be special or holy. Numerous languages have been asserted by various religions to have special or divine properties: Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Tibetan, Persian, and even English. The question of linguistic competence is often brought up by religious apologists seeking to deflect issues raised by skeptics about problematic passages in their scriptures, but when good translations and linguistic resources are available, this is just a smokescreen. When there are errors in fact or reasoning in a translation, or instances of morally reprehensible behaviour, the problems are rarely made better by referring to the primary text in the original language. (In fact, the problems are sometimes worse, as religious translators attempt to minimise or downplay those aspects of the text which they think might offend their target audience.)

The fact that a lack of linguistic expertise is not actually a real issue with many religious apologists is made evident by the double standard of insisting on linguistic qualifications from critics of their scriptures, while criticising the scriptures of others without studying those in their original language. For example, no Muslim apologist has ever refrained from arguing that the Torah has been corrupted, in spite of not being able to read Hebrew and not having any substantial knowledge of the history of Jewish scripture. Similarly, many of the popular apologists for various religions are not trained in the study of religion, nor in the fields whose findings they claim support their religious beliefs.

Linguistic expertise, or indeed expertise in any field, is nowhere as important as demonstrating the ability to reason. For example, if I claimed that the arguments made by the Indian Buddhist philosophers against monotheism are absolutely devastating, no monotheist would accept that they are disqualified from rebutting these arguments on the grounds that they cannot read Sanskrit. Arguments must stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of which language they are expressed in. Linguistic expertise may allow a religious believer to gain a deeper understanding of the texts of his or her religion, but it can never defend his or her beliefs against criticisms made on the basis of logic or facts.

In the intersection between history and language, we find the story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–8). In order for this story to be true, it would have to be possible to build a skyscraper using nothing but Bronze Age brick technology. Any material sturdy enough to support a tower that reached to the sky would also be durable enough to leave behind some evidence for the present day, but no such evidence exists, and it is difficult to believe that the technology was used in just the one tower if it had existed. Furthermore, we humans have subsequently built towers reaching into the sky. Indeed, we have entire cities full of them. We have even left the confines of the Earth’s surface and walked on the Moon. And yet none of these developments brought about any visible divine intervention. Instead, they are the products of science and engineering.

So, even though the spotlight is on biology as a field where science and religion are in conflict, it is not the only one. I have discussed some examples from history and linguistics above, but there are many others. The point is that the more broadly educated a person is, the more obvious it becomes that every religious belief can be explained as a human product of its time and place, without recourse to divine intervention. In order to maintain a belief in the literal inerrancy of the Bible, it is not sufficient merely to assert intelligent design creationism as an alternative to the biological theory of evolution. One must also propose alternate theories to the standard theories in the fields of archeology, linguistics, history, hydrology, geology, astronomy, material science, and so on.

Religious believers cannot accuse a skeptic of ignoring the evidence. As I hope I have shown, the more evidence one examines, the stronger the case becomes that religion is a human invention. Conversely, religious believers often do not examine the evidence themselves, instead relying on people they presume to be experts. But even if there are experts in Middle Eastern history, say, who are fervent Christians, or experts in classical Arabic who are devout Muslims, there are people who are equally expert in those subjects who believe in other religions, or in no religion. Furthermore, an expert in Middle Eastern history may be quite ignorant of another area in which the evidence demonstrates that their beliefs are false, and no one can be an expert in every field touching upon their religious beliefs.

When religious believers defer to supposed authorities as their reason for believing that their religion is true, they’re essentially admitting that they do not consider themselves qualified to judge the evidence and arguments for themselves. But in that case, they would also be unqualified to judge whether the evidence is actually incompatible with their beliefs or whether the arguments allegedly supporting their beliefs are wrong. When religious believers cite an authority whose arguments they do not themselves understand as the justification for their beliefs, the discussion is basically at an impasse. For example, there are what I think are serious problems or errors in the arguments for monotheism made by Ghazālī and Plantinga. If I’m right and their arguments are wrong, then citing these authorities has done nothing to convince me. However, if I’m wrong and their arguments are right, then I’m simply incapable of seeing how they could be right, and thus I am not convinced by their arguments in that case either.

This is the reason that the geographic and temporal aspects of the evidence that religion is a human invention are so powerful. It is so easy to explain to anyone: just plot the spread of the world’s religions on a series of maps corresponding to successive instances in time. When you do so, it can be clearly seen by anyone that religious beliefs and ideas are spread by human migration, conquest, and contact. You do not have to be an expert to immediately notice that there are no instances of “misplaced jinn”, that is, reports of human interactions with supernatural beings in a place and time where humans did not already believe that such beings exist. The simplest and best explanation for this readily observable fact is that supernatural beings such as gods, or angels, or demons, or jinn, do not exist outside of the human imagination.

This is not to say that the phenomena which they were concocted to explain do not exist, such as people hearing voices, seeing strange lights, feeling a presence that is not visible, getting spontaneously cured of diseases, becoming inexplicably ill, and so on. In fact, given that these phenomena do exist and need explaining, it is easy to see how people all over the world came up with the idea of supernatural beings, or witchcraft. And, for a person who is surrounded only by those who share the same view of the supernatural world (which would be most people in history), the explanation is good enough. The problem only arises when you begin to compare what different religions teach about the supernatural world, and examine how the descriptions of the supernatural world coming from a particular time and place just happen to correspond exactly with the religious composition and dispositions of the people living there. This is something that only a few scholars would have had the privilege to even be in a position to notice in a hundred years ago, but with the spread of libraries and the Internet, it is something that many people now can see for themselves.

(Continued in part 20 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 16
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 7
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 18

Reposted from my Facebook:

This is a poster for a Christmas Party hosted by Campus for Christ which is found all over UW campus. The problem with it is that the Arabic writing at the top is wrong. As anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the Arabic script knows, the letters should be joined, and they change their shape according to position. Clearly, someone had typed the word “Christmas” into a translation program on a computer not equipped to handle Arabic glyph-shaping, and put it on the poster without actually bothering to check it with anyone who can actually read Arabic.

Lesson: If you’re going to plaster something all over campus in a foreign language, do yourself the favour of getting someone who actually knows the language to translate it for you so you don’t massively embarrass yourself. I’m sure there’s at least one Christian who knows Arabic on UW campus. Seriously.

In today’s world, it’s very important for computer software to be able to support multiple languages. You can’t assume that, just because your software is sold in a predominantly English-language market, your users won’t try to use it with other languages.

In a previous post, I noted the current lack of support for glyph-shaping and other aspects of complex text layout on the Android phone. I hope that this changes in the near future (and, if I have any say about it, it will).

– davinci 11859

No related posts.

One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands. It is a dictum of traditional Chinese culture that children should obey their parents without question. My parents have never explained to me why I should have been punished so harshly for my interest in science, and I was left to infer this from what they punished me for doing, as well as from their criticisms.

I was punished in high school by my parents for reading books and journals, writing papers, attending scientific lectures, meeting with people who shared my interests, and giving presentations — exactly the things that constitute the academic life of a scientist. At the same time, my parents insisted that they supported my education, and bragged about this to everyone they knew. I had no guarantee that altering my behaviour would have reduced their interference with my studies, and doing so would certainly have compromised my ability to succeed academically. I really had no idea what I was doing that was so upsetting to them, especially since my teachers and my classmates’ parents showered praises upon me for my activities.

When it came to my parents’ criticisms, there were really just two major ones. The first was that I was doing things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, which is to say things that other Chinese students at around my age were not doing, such as making regular trips to the university library or meeting with professors. But this criticism was absurd, because the people that my parents expected me to imitate would not be going on to careers in science. Many of them might have ended up in university, but in applied areas such as accounting or engineering, and even then, their purpose was to “get a degree” to qualify for a job or to please their parents, and not to prepare themselves to do graduate research. And besides, some of them had personally told me that they wished that they were more like me. And yet my parents kept telling me that I should be more like them. So my parents were basically pressuring me to be more like people who expressed admiration for the fact that I had the courage to defy them, and who resented their own parents for forcing them to do things that they didn’t want to do. I found the situation darkly comical. As the saying goes, one should be careful what one wishes for.

The second major criticism was that the subjects I was intent on studying were useless or impractical^[1]. I don’t know if this is more of a linguistic or a cultural issue, but my parents would invariably interpret “theoretical” to mean “worthless” or “frivolous”. My father would say things such as, “If you want to study theory, wait until after you’re retired”, which of course makes no sense whatsoever. This misinterpretation was not restricted to just my parents, but was quite common among my Cantonese-speaking classmates, who had presumably acquired it from their parents. I suppose that this partially explains the abundance of students from a Cantonese background in engineering and their paucity in the pure sciences.

I have already written much about my interest in religion as a geopolitical force, and about how I had turned my attention to Islam and the Muslim world after my parents had forbidden me from studying the physics of computation in high school. While I had been interested in these subjects since elementary school, I returned to them at the end of high school because I knew that information retrieval in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu would become important within a few years — and I turned out to be right.

Information retrieval was most certainly a topic within applied computer science, and — at a time when Google was becoming a common verb in the English language — its practicality could not be denied. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this was especially true for information retrieval in languages written using the Perso-Arabic script. I began my Master’s degree in computer science less than a year and a half after 9/11, and information retrieval in Arabic was a very hot topic. For obvious reasons, numerous companies, think tanks, governmental agencies, and private organisations were very interested in it.

I had planned to research information retrieval in Persian as the topic of my Master’s thesis while I worked on quantum computing on the side. Splitting my attention like this was less than ideal, but it was better than being prevented from studying what I wanted to study entirely. I was even prepared to research information retrieval in Arabic, even though I was less familiar with that language than with Persian, because it was in higher demand. (The two languages are not related, despite the borrowing of a large amount of vocabulary from Arabic into Persian. Arabic is a Semitic language, whereas Persian is Indo-European.) I thought that the relative lack of interest for research into information retrieval in Persian was rather shortsighted, because the invasion of Iraq by America and its allies had just begun. It was inevitable that Iraq would fall, and almost as certain that Iran would become a major regional power with the demise of its archnemesis.

If my parents’ reason for dismissing quantum computing as “worthless” was that it had not led to any practical applications, they should have had no objections to information retrieval in either Arabic or Persian. Instead, it was now these topics which would send my father into a screaming rage. When I casually mentioned that I was studying Persian while having dinner at my parents’ house, my father immediately became very angry and yelled at me that he forbid me from continuing. After I had gone home, my mother telephoned me to tell me how upset my father was and begged me not to upset him any more. And she would remind me of this every time she called me thereafter.

What could I possibly do? My entire purpose behind studying information retrieval in Persian was so that I could use it to deflect my parents’ criticism that my research interests were “not practical” while studying quantum computing which my father had repeatedly declared to be “worthless”. And now I was basically not allowed to study information retrieval in Persian, despite the fact that it was eminently practical, without being given any reason. (I suppose that my mother had given me the reason that the topic “upset [my] father”, but since apparently everything upset him, this essentially conveyed no information.)

I had no choice but to change my academic plans once again on account of my parents. Many parents sacrifice their careers for the sake of their children; but in my family, I was always the one who had to sacrifice my career to appease my parents, and especially my father, who was continually throwing temper tantrums like a two-year-old child. (In the literature on developmental psychology, this phenomenon is called “(parent-child) role reversal”.)

In my efforts to thwart my parents’ continual attempts to destroy my scientific career, I had been operating under the assumption that they were acting under a consistent if incorrect set of beliefs. They had repeatedly told me that my interest in quantum computing was “not practical”, and I actually took them at their word. But when I turned to a topic that no sane person could possibly deny was practical, they attacked me for it anyway, for essentially no reason whatsoever.

In retrospect, I had given them far too much credit in terms of their motivation. Now I think that their intention was simply to punish me for demonstrating creativity and initiative, values which are necessary for science but which are completely antithetical to traditional Chinese culture. They would have punished me no matter what I was interested in, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with quantum computing per se, but rather with the fact that I was not a mindless automaton like they believed my Chinese high school classmates to be. They punished me because they could not legitimately lay claim to credit for the accomplishments that I had achieved by behaving in a manner completely contrary to their wishes. The only way to escape their punishment was to obey them completely and submissively, with no will of my own.

I suppose that this possibility was always on the back of my mind, but I had to act as if it wasn’t true. I had to believe that there was some way I could complete a graduate degree in computer science without their interference causing my failure. And so, in spite of the frustration and pain it caused me, I changed my research topic once again.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life