How Climate Change Skeptics Made Me Feel Better About Ebola

The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.

1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.

See? Problem dismissed.

Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.

On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:




I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".

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Abraham's Myths

This is mostly a note for myself, but I thought I would post it for anyone interested. I've been re-reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Although written for an evangelical audience, it applies almost equally well to Mormons. (I've mentioned the book before, and it is routinely recommended by Ben Spackman.) In reading chapter 2 I was struck by Enns's explanation for why Genesis resembles the older myths of other ancient cultures. Before proceeding it is important to know what Enns means by 'myth.'

Myth is an ancient, premodern, pre-scientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Enns thinks it all starts with Abraham. (The italics are original.)

It is important to remember where Abraham came from and where he was headed....The Mesopotamian world from which Abraham came was one whose own stories of origins had been expressed in mythic categories for a considerable length of time. Moreover, the land Abraham was going to enter, the land of the Canaanites, was likewise rich in its own myths....

As God entered into a relationship with Abraham, he "met" him where he was--an ancient Mesopotamian man who breathed the air of the ancient Near East. We must surely assume that Abraham, as such a man, shared the worldview of those whose world he shared and not a modern, scientific one. The reason the opening chapters of Genesis look so much like the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is that the worldview categories of the ancient Near East were ubiquitous and normative at the time. Of course, different cultures had different myths, but the point is that they all had them....

What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them....

We might think that such a scenario is unsatisfying because it gives too much ground to pagan myths. But we must bear in mind how very radical this notion would have been in the ancient world. For a second-millennium Semitic people...to say that the gods of Babylon were not worth worshiping but that the true god was the god of a nomad like Abraham--this was risky, ridiculous, and counterintuitive....

To put it differently, God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.

[T]he question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins....The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship....Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed the only way.

Although the Egyptians aren't mentioned, they also had a rich mythology. That Enns builds his argument around Abraham is of special LDS interest given our Book of Abraham. However, the argument is equally applicable to Moses. God's covenant people were surrounded by powerful polytheistic cultures and empires for hundreds to thousands of years. It makes sense that they needed myths of their own, and that those myths looked somewhat similar to those of their neighbors.

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Let's Be Frank About the Book of Mormon Introduction

Daniel Peterson spoke at the annual FAIR conference last month, and the transcript of his talk has been posted online. Peterson's talk was titled, "Some Reflections On That Letter To a CES Director," a reference to a document that has been circulating for a year or two that compiles together a lot of criticisms of the Church. Not surprisingly, the issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon was raised. After dismissing the relevance of genetics under the theory that the Book of Mormon peoples were a very small group mixing with a large established population, Peterson turned to the introduction of the Book of Mormon.

[Letter to a CES Director] “Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page of the 2006 edition of the Book of Mormon shortly after the DNA results were released?” Quote: “The Lamanites were the principal ancestors of the American Indians” is changed to, “The Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”

Well, the implication is “because the DNA evidence undercut the Church’s position.” That’s not true. I happen to know the backstory, which has never been published. The backstory is, there were people who objected to that heading when it was done in the late 1970s/early 1980s. They were overruled by someone who was in a position of authority. But, they said the Book of Mormon never actually makes that claim. Don’t make the Book of Mormon claim things it doesn’t actually claim. We set ourselves up sometimes for problems when we claim things for the book, but that the book, when carefully read, does not claim for itself.

This is the kind of thing that drives believers-turned-critics crazy, and I can sympathize. I have a specific memory [1] of reading the introduction to the Book of Mormon as a missionary and coming across the passage in question. This was before DNA had become an issue, but it was still the case that virtually everyone outside the Church thought that American Indians came from Asia. I remember reading that line about the Lamanites being the "principal ancestors of the American Indians" and thinking that if the prophets and apostles were certain enough to put that in the introduction, then it must be the case.

I've obviously had to rethink that position and the assumptions behind it in subsequent years [2], but I have to admit that it irks me a little to see the wording simply attributed to someone in authority. It is hard to believe that the wording of the introduction was not read closely by the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles, and it is also hard to believe that the wording would have stood if any of them had reservations about it. I don't dispute Peterson's backstory, but it doesn't really solve the problem anyway. All it shows is that those who objected to the wording were not the ones in authority. That kind of makes the critique stronger.

It might be the case that former believers can be faulted for various failings, but taking seriously the Church's own introduction to the book that is the 'keystone of our religion' is not one of them. I think a better approach is simply to acknowledge that when the introduction was written (1981), Church leaders held the traditional LDS belief and assumption that the Lamanites were the main ancestors of the American Indians. However, it wasn't a crucial issue and so when strong evidence showed it to be in error, the wording was changed. What's the harm in a straightforward answer like that? (It's actually not that different from the Church's own explanation.)

Notes:

1. It is a memory I don't think I ever wrote down. As such, the standard disclaimers apply.

2. On a related note, I also remember one of my MTC teachers driving home the importance of using materials approved by the Church in teaching. Whether intended or not, one of the messages that came through to me was that you can have full confidence in materials published by the Church. Unfortunately, I have had to rethink that as well.

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Are We Too Stupid to NOT Believe in Free Will?

Over at his blog, Sic et Non, Daniel Peterson highlighted a Scientific American article from last June asking what happens if society stops believing in free will. The article is pay-walled but, according to Peterson's summary, experiments suggest that people become less judgmental and punitive. However, they are also more likely to act less like a Boy Scout.

Participants in scientific experiments who’ve just read a strongly anti-free-will passage seem to show a significantly greater tendency (50%!) than their fellow participants to cheat on academic tests. Other experiments showed a higher tendency to cruelty among readers of such passages, and decreased impulse control.

This gives me an excuse to think out loud: Maybe there are falsehoods that we need to generally believe because otherwise a significant number of morons would run us all off the rails. I'm reminded of an article at The Onion from a few years ago: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed [Federal Reserve chairman Ben] Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"

Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.

Yes, in a sense money is an illusion, but it's an illusion that works [1]. However, if enough people actually came to believe that dollars, for example, were worthless, life would suddenly be a lot harder. (Even for the gold hoarders, I think, but that's a topic for another day.)

So anyway, although I tend to think of humanity in a positive aspirational light, it is abundantly clear that there are a lot of menaces (and potential menaces) to society out there. And morons. (Let's face it, we're all morons in some way). I can imagine God considering what to tell humanity and thinking, "Well, I'm going to say X, Y, and Z, even though it's not strictly accurate, because if I give them more accurate information the humans will self-destruct [2]."

We are free to choose, the scriptures say. But maybe that's because if they said anything else, we'd all go to hell in a handbasket.


Notes:
1. For a neat example, check out this story about how fake money ended inflation in Brazil.

2. God does not lie. But in a way, anything less than the full accurate truth is misleading. However, the full accurate truth may be incomprehensible to mortals or dangerous to their well-being. And so we get accommodations (baby stories, as Brigham Young called one example) which begin to look like falsehoods in the light of better information. What is a truthful God to do? Also, see D&C 19:4-12.

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