Reason vs Science and COVID-19

That which is reasonable isn't necessarily scientific, and is frequently untrue. 

Should America be locked down? More and more reasonable voices say no. And they have their reasonable advocates. The problem is that reason in this case isn't scientific, just as a reasonable hypothesis can be totally false.

For example. Given all we know about the relationship between disease and death we can reasonably say that there are usually multiple causes of death, and frequently multiple diseases involved. This leads to the reasonable hypothesis that the COVID-19 disease caused by the corona virus may not be any more fatal than the seasonal flu; that it is simply one of many co-morbidities involved in the deaths of those who have it. And it reasonably follows that drastic steps taken to halt its spread are ill conceived. 

To move beyond reason to science we would now need to test this hypothesis. The obvious test is to expose a large population to the corona virus and then see if mortality rates are significantly above normal. Of course we would need to control for other factors as well: things such as available health care interventions, overall health of the population involved, and of course population density, climate, and patterns of social interaction. But it could be done.

The problem, and this has always been the problem for epidemiology, is that the only definitive experiments must be run in real time on real humans. And that means that the if the reasonable hypothesis turns out to be wrong a lot of real people die unnecessarily. This is why when human lives are at stake epidemiologists recommend public policy based on the worst-case reasonable hypothesis. In this case the hypothesis that a disease such is COVID-19 is likely to be the leading cause of death, increasing greatly the risk of death, and not merely being on of many factors. 

And we've been here before. Stringent measures to reduce air pollution, the banning of smoking indoors, the removal of potential carcinogens from food, the imposition of mandatory vaccinations, requiring seat belts and airbags in autos, and a thousand others public policies flew in the face of reasonable hypothesis concerning causes of death from smoking, cancer, disease, and auto accidents. Whole industries labored to produce reasonable hypothesis to maintain the status quo. And these policies that we now take for granted were the implementation of the worst case hypothesis long before full data was available. They were, quite frankly, experiments on human populations. They happen to be experiments that have uniformly shown that their hypothetical basis was accurate. 

But they haven't just saved lives. They have been the basis for a robust economy. Because there is nothing more valuable to an economy than human lives. Only humans, when they have enough, immediately begin to imagine new things to want. And that includes humans "sheltering in place." Like our deep ancestors hunkered down in a cave against lions and the cold we stand apart from our primate cousins in that we want entertainment and we love to create. From chalk art on sidewalks to YouTube videos to home-knitted sweaters to electronic concertos (even now being written) to cures for diseases we haven't stopped wanting or creating just because we're currently in the cave. 

And what that means, or so I reasonably hypothesize, is that what we'll see in the future isn't a ruined economy, but a changed economy. We are learning to want different kinds of more than we already have. And we'll discover some things we thought we desperately wanted are not all that important. But of course the results aren't in from the only experiment that can test my ideas.

Offering Reasonable Hope

A number of years ago I was asked to sit in on the United Nations conference studying near earth objects, or NEOs.  The purpose of the conference was to discuss how people should be alerted if there was the possibility of one of these objects striking the earth. Two moments in the conference really stood out for me. 

The first was a short talk by a gentleman who specialized in communicating danger to the public.   He said, and I believe he is right "no one understands risk communicated in percentages. If there’s a chance of rain just tell people to take an umbrella." 

The second memorable moment came at the end of the first day. I was sitting at the back of the room being quiet while all the officials and scientists talked. Then one of them noticed my presence and asked me who I was and why I was there. I answered that I was a guest of one of the organizers and was just observing. Then I said that I was a teacher in a theological school. He quickly shot back, “A theologian. Good. We need a back up plan.“

This may be a little hard to take for those of us who are religious leaders.  But the reality is that in some situations we really are just the back up plan. Indeed, in contemporary society, God or an appeal to God is almost always just the back up plan.

In the face of a crisis Christians have had traditionally two things to say. One is that God is all powerful. “Expect a miracle.“  Second the second is that God is all loving. “His eye is on the sparrow so I know he watches me.” 

The first message comes across these days as the claim that God is like the Wizard of Oz. Too bad that curtain has been pulled back and the claim no longer has  any practical credibility.  That God is all powerful by definition is a theological fact.  But even taking the experience of the Christian community as a whole through time God’s deployment of God‘s power is utterly unpredictable. But then God, and God’s revelation warns us of this. God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.  

Within the natural realm that reality encompasses our bodily existence. In this world there is no Divine reward for good or punishment for evil. The wheels of justice may grind finely, but boy do they ever grind slowly. And if God does not deploy God’s power on the basis of morality, then on what basis can we imagine that it is deployed? "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” is a claim based on faith, not observable evidence. 

In any case the identification of an event as a miracle isn’t a claim based on a direct relationship between the event and God’s use of God’s power. The claim of the miraculous is based on the faith claim that God loves us and that God is the power behind all the powers of the earth.  It is made on the basis of the deep insight through faith that God loves God’s creation and God's creatures.  The claim that a friend was cured of cancer is a miracle, or that a child was conceived when it seemed impossible is a miracle, are witnesses from my faith, not my study of medicine. 

But this gets us to the second important claim that we as Christians make about God. God is Love.  And thus we are encompassed by God’s love.  The real problem is how to make this claim credible to others. In our time this requires that we offer reasonable hope rather than irrational or unreasonable claims.  

And the reasonable basis of Christian hope is not difficult. Clearly, against all odds, humanity in both the physical and moral sense has emerged within the natural world.  We have emerged as a species capable of understanding the order of nature and intervening on our behalf and behalf of other creatures for the good. And equally against all odds the natural world of which we are a part turns out to be predictable.  And it becomes more and more predictable the more and more we understand its complexity.  And the more we understand its complexity the more we can appreciate our human ability. And the more we can create tools that can effectively do good in the midst of that complexity. 

I’d like to say that the long odds make this a miracle, but that would make winning the lottery by betting on a single number a miracle as well. In short its an evangelistic dead end that puts Christian claims in the same category as those of gamblers who claim to have a system to beat the slots. 

What makes our situation amazing, wonderful, humbling, and indeed miraculous is the reasonable claim that our world springs from God’s love. This does not mean that we must somehow claim that God has been busy tinkering with evolution, in a sense loading the dice in one direction or another. That’s even worse than the gambler’s system; it is God cheating against God’s own rules in a way that undermines the stewardship of creation God assigned to humans. 

Worse, it becomes just another claim to be debated among scientists. It bears no relationship to the fundamental witness of Christianity that God incarnate came among us, ministered to us, died on the cross out of love for us and was resurrected from the dead. It is this witness alone that makes clear to the eyes of faith that God, who from a place outside of space and time created our universe, created it out of love and continues to love us beyond our death and non-existence in this same universe. It is the witness that God, as God, is all encompassing Love. 

Reasonable hope is offered in the claim that if you enter into the community of faith, if you cultivate an understanding of God‘s love among those who have sought to understand that love through the millennia, then you will begin to have true insight into the fact that God loves you and God loves the world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.“ Evangelism is not an invitation to believe. It is an invitation to join the community that over long eons has learned hope from its constant engagement with the Spirit of Christ. By our constant effort to live into eternity through Christ we know what scientists and gamblers cannot know because they haven't made the effort. 

Anything else we offer as a Christian community will ultimately be unreasonable, and indeed beyond the scope of our competence. 

Yet for those seeking hope our invitation is utterly reasonable. If you seek knowledge you join the community of scholarship. If you seek power you join the community of the rich and powerful. If you seek wisdom you sit in the councils of the wise. If you seek hope you join the community for whom the cultivation and spread of hope is and always has been the sole concern. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” That is the Gospel, that is reasonable hope. 

Science not Sacrifice

Recently Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of the state of Texas suggested that he, and by extension other “Sr. Citizens” should be willing to risk infection and COVID-19 rather than sacrifice the country and its economic prospects. And thus by extension the lives of children and grandchildren.

He got pretty beat up for it. But for the wrong reasons.

Religious people took him on for the implied suggestion of the sacrifice of the lives of the elderly to save the economy. That was my first response but it was misguided. Gov. Cuomo said there didn’t need to be a tradeoff between public safety and the economy. A good tweet but not backed up by an actual strategy. On the sentimental side folks said that children and grandchildren would rather have parents and grand parents than a quick return to economic prosperity. I’d like to think so myself but its not an evidence based assertion. 

And that’s what is really wrong with Mr. Patrick’s suggestion. Instead of acting on evidence he is suggesting that decisions be made on the basis of the Christian religious concept of sacrifice. By turning policy decisions into decisions about who should sacrifice he turns what should be a rational scientific discussion into a journey into sentimentality. And by turning to the Christian religious concept of sacrifice he makes political decisions into personal decisions and commitments. 

This is a common move in contemporary US political culture, but it draws on the wrong portions of our cultural inheritance.

A state, and a nation, cannot long survive when it replaces rational decisions about public policy with opportunities for sentimental personal decisions based on quasi-religious concepts of sacrifice. This is one of the reasons the US founding fathers kept religion out of government and focused on the common good. And that Enlightenment culture of rationality is the culture we need right now. 

The science of epidemiology demonstrates that epidemics spread through a population until all those who are too weak to resist the disease die and the rest develop immunity, or the virus is so isolated it isn’t readily transmitted. How much of the population is affected directly depends on how easily the disease is transmitted and how quickly immunity is developed. The science says that the most lives are saved, not just elderly lives, when the spread of the disease is slowed as much as possible. 

And economics tells us that the basis of any economy is healthy workers producing goods and services that healthy customers can buy. A decrease of even 1% of the population hurts an economy badly. And if that decrease is accompanied by spikes in unrecoverable medical costs, distortions in production and consumption, long term lost productivity, and a failure in confidence in the government to save lives it is even worse. Mr. Patrick didn’t factor any of these into his policy ideas, focusing instead on his utterly irrelevant personal willingness to sacrifice. 

It isn’t the task of government, or government officials, to offer citizens a way to construct meaningful lives. It is, if I may quote the US constitution. “To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Ultimately Mr. Patrick, or indeed any of us, may wish to find meaning through our willingness to serve larger aims than our personal health or prosperity. Religion may well guide our understanding of those larger purposes. Or we may find those purposes in our larger social world. But let’s keep that out of policy making in a time of crisis. We need science, not sacrifice. 

The Religion of Human Sacrifice - Good to Go in Texas.

On March 19th Gov. Gregg Abbott (corrected to add: suspended the Texas Open Meetings act) and declared a ban on meetings of over 50 persons state wide. He then noted in a TV interview that it didn’t include religious bodies because he wanted to protect their religious freedom. https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/gov-abbott-freedom-of-religion-means-churches-not-in-covid-19-order-but-many-making-changes/amp/

This is a completely bogus reading of the meaning of religious freedom. We do not offer religious freedom to people who practice human sacrifice. And letting religious groups hold large gatherings that create vectors for the spread of the corona virus will be followed inevitably by an increased numbers of deaths, an overstressed hospital system, and then even more deaths. It is apparently Gov. Abbott’s affirmation of human sacrifice as a legitimate religious option in the State of Texas.

I note as well that this effectively allows religious groups to continue to hold open meetings to promulgate and organize their political agenda while preventing all others from doing so. It is yet another attack on political freedom of all except Abbott's religious allies.

Finally, I note that in the interview Gov. Abbott referred only to churches, not to mosques, temples, synagogues, gurdwaras, and other religious groups. Apparently religious freedom in Gov. Abbott's world is religious freedom for Christians only. Or maybe he just doesn't realize how religiously diverse his state really is.

Religious people need to reject this immoral, inhuman, unconstitutional, and anti-Christian understanding of religious freedom. We need to stand for the freedom of our fellow humans to live, and to live in safety. That is the single overriding freedom of a nation that claims to live “under God."

Do Muslims Worship the Same God as Christians? 

Lets take a look.