May 16, 2017
One of the more interesting things to come out of the last few
months in my own personal Mixed Mental Arts experience has been
hearing more from all of you how these ideas resonate with all of
you. In particular, I appreciated a conversation with Matty
(@Matt_Maurer on Twitter) about how he appreciated that history
could be seen as one long progression. Humanity has always been
trying to solve very much the same problems. It is just that over
time we have been able to see further because we have had
more and more shoulders to stand on. Why are we so much smarter
than the people of the past? Well, coming of age in the culture of
science, I was led to draw a sharp line between the scientific
project and religions. Science was real. It was tangible. It was
based on evidence. It was TRUTH. And anyone who disagreed,
questioned or thought anything else was an idiot and a fool.
However, as I've mentioned elsewhere, in reading the science that
simple narrative has become increasingly problematic for me. The
people of the past weren't so biologically different. Their brains
recognized patterns. Did they not recognize patterns in human
behavior that have stood the test of time? Yes. They did. And it
wasn't until I was confronted by having to spend time among
Christian Fundamentalists that I had to really think hard about
what, if anything, made science special. Someone else who has had
to think hard about these questions is today's guest sensei in the
dojo Mohamed Ghilan. Mohamed was born in Saudi Arabia like yours
truly. Unlike yours truly, he has a PhD in Neuroscience, is getting
an MD and is a Muslim. As a scientist and a Muslim, he knows full
well that the evolution of better and better beliefs and mental
tools was going on well before science showed up on the scene.
Today, someone like Mohamed is often portrayed in the media as a
bit of a unicorn. He's a Muslim AND a scientist. Whaaaaaat?!? Is
that even possible?!? But in the first four or so centuries of
Islam the majority of "scientists" were Muslim. Richard Dawkins
captured the two parts of this story in his now infamous
tweet "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than
Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle
Ages, though." Dawkins' own tweet creates problems in his narrative
that religion is the problem. If Muslims did great things in the
Middle Ages, then why is the problem Islam? If Newton was religious
AND a scientist AND an alchemist, then why is the problem
Christianity or even magical thinking? And what is science anyway?
As I've discussed in previous podcasts, some Christians objected to
Newton's Theory of Gravity because the idea that the planets
moved all by themselves conflicted with their belief that God
actively moved the planets. Then, they moved on. Gravity was
something they could confirm with their own eyes and to keep
Christianity relevant and practical they had to evolve their
understanding of God. Did they stop believing in God? Nope. They
just adopted a more mature of God. "When I was a child, I spake as
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I
became a man, I put away childish things." - 1 Corinthians 13:11
Were the people who didn't understand Newton's Universal Theory of
Gravitation idiots? Nope. In large part, they just didn't have the
glassmaking technology to make the kind of telescopes necessary to
observe the planets. And The Scientific Method itself evolved over
time but some consider the founder of The Scientific Method to have
been a Muslim named Ibn al-Haytham due to his emphasis on
experimental data and reproducibility of results. Why then are we
repeatedly told the story that science and religion are somehow
incompatible? By some analyses, a Muslim FOUNDED Science. If
we want to popularize science, then isn't it in science's interest
to tear down this popular story that science and religion are at
odds. Of course, some of the beliefs of science and religion don't
overlap, notably on the age of the Earth and the origins of life.
But, it turns out that science has found its way back to many of
the beliefs that religious people figured out long ago. In my
article
Was Jesus Christ a Better Neuroscientist than Sam Harris?, I
explored my own journey towards the painful realization that in the
realm of human affairs science had 2000 years later merely
reinvented the wheel. In response, I got a comment
from someone named Arslan Atajanov asked "Since when science
became a belief system?" Ten years ago, I would have asked the same
question as Arslan. Now, I know better. Science has always been a
belief system. It is a response to how our minds work. Humans form
beliefs. We have always formed beliefs. And apparently by the time
of Ibn Haytham there was already awareness that testing one's
beliefs against the evidence was a good thing to do. In practice,
people do this all the time. Look at Game of Thrones. People had
theories about Jon Snow being dead or not. Then, they watched the
next season. Oh! He wasn't dead. They changed their beliefs and
moved on. But now imagine that what you believed about Jon Snow
being dead or alive became tribal. Now, the French believed that
Jon Snow was alive. The Americans believed Jon Snow was dead. Real
Americans believed Jon Snow was dead. Then Season 6 Episode 1 airs.
New evidence surfaces. Yep. It looks like Jon Snow is alive. The
French gloat. They insult the Americans' intelligence. How could
they have been SO STUPID to have thought that Jon Snow was ever
alive? Now, the Americans get defensive and come up with a series
of rationalizations to defend their beliefs. It becomes a point of
pride and identity. And so, the conflict builds for 150 years after
the show originally aired. Pretty soon neither side is looking at
the evidence. It has simple become an article of faith for both
sides. How do you end this conflict? Well, you point out that
before Season 6 aired no one could have known whether Jon Snow was
dead or alive and that we all happily kept track with the story for
the first five seasons. You could also point out that in this
sectarian feud both sides have been losers. We're all better off
moving on. Of course, some people have built their whole brand
around this idea of incompatibility. That's their shtick. They're
not likely to back down anytime soon. I understand that some people
are annoyed with hearing about Sam Harris but the Mixed Mental Arts
audience is perhaps unusually diverse. We have Christians in the
dojo who are trying to figure out how to reconcile their faith with
science like Jason Scott Sanders and Kim Ares. And we have numerous
Muslims who rather than listening to Bryan and me talk about Islam
wanted actual Muslims on the show. You couldn't ask for a better
ambassador than Mohamed Ghilan. In this conversation with Mohamed,
we clarified what science is. It's a formalization of what humans
already do. If you ask me, science has become overformalized.
That's why I'm so excited about Mixed Mental Arts. Science has
become so bogged down in internal tribal disputes. (A problem Sam
Harris has also complained about when he talks about the
balkanization of science.) The question is what do you do about
that? Well, scientists aren't likely to overcome their tribalism
internally. Famous scientists often end up standing in the way of the
progress of science as a whole. And if you're someone like Sam
who is still imprisoned by his intuitions of authority, then you
are stuck there. You complain to Joe Rogan about the fact that
people like me have a Twitter account and then complain that
scientists don't work together to form better beliefs. Complain.
Complain. Complain. What's the solution, Sam? The solution is
harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to sift through the evidence
and evolve better beliefs. You abandon all intuitions of human
authority and make the evidence the authority with the knowledge
that you need to take into account all the evidence. And this is
where the beliefs of The New Atheists about the Islamic world FAIL
as scientific hypotheses. They fit a very selective cherrypicking
of the data. They make sense to someone with limited experience of
the Middle East. They don't make sense to someone like Mohamed (or
even me with my much more limited experience). Well, in this
interview, Mohamed focused on corruption and that's a HUGE factor.
However, there are others. Muslims don't read. When they do, they
don't read widely. The central belief system is not well organized
and there is no coherent messaging so people can believe lots of
things and CLAIM they're being Muslims. And, on top of all that,
there's a focus on past historical greatness that doesn't fit
present realities. All those things describe not just Islam. They
describe America. Fixing all that takes a lot of work. It's a game
of inches. Do you know what doesn't help? Constantly being told
that your culture is the problem. It just creates defensiveness.
There are problems with Islamic and American culture. And no...I'm
not saying they're equivalent. But, in no situation, does
indiscriminately criticizing people's culture help establish a
bridge. You have to find things of value and then build strength
where strength exists and then use that trust to together and
reciprocally examine problematic areas. How do I know? Because I
just did the opposite of that with The New Atheists. This was the
response I got. 
In the end, The New Atheists have
alienated religious people from science and I have alienated the
New Atheists from me. But thanks to Sam saying Candyman we can now
strip The New Atheists of their credibility to
being responsive to evidence. I presented them with the
evidence to read and they showed little to no interest in it. They
merely defended their beliefs in a blindly emotional (and perfectly
understandable) way. We're all down in the muck of being human
together and all the belief systems' various claims will have to be
tested on the evidence. Fortunately, from The Diffusion of
Innovations, we know people choose beliefs that are relatable
and usable. We make this science accessible and the best ideas
currently available. WILL win. As Scott Radtke pointed out in an
email to me "you have chosen the most difficult task of diffusion;
the diffusion of ideas. Invisible ideas pushing against mountains
of entrenched, equally invisible ideas." We have chosen that task.
And as your faithful companion Toto pulls back the curtain on the
Wizards, I can guarantee you that they will tell you to pay no
attention. I can only pull the curtain back. You must examine the
evidence. But with guides like Spiros, Mohamed, Tony Molina, Jon
Aguilar and countless great books and thinkers, you are sure to
find the way. In the end, we offer you options. It's up to you to
decide what is useful, what is not and what you should add that is
uniquely your own. That is how you evolve your own Mixed Mental
Arts. 
To that end, you're not going to
find a better resource on how to reconcile Islam and science than
Mohamed Ghilan. Mohamed blogs at Andalus Online, tweets from
@MohamedGhilan and can be found on Facebook here. It was an
absolute pleasure to have him in the Mixed Mental Arts dojo and I
look forward to helping unwind this utterly unnecessary spat
between science and religion with people like him.