Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
techgnosis.com
techgnosis.com
The original link is actually http://www.feedbag.com/re/re172_master.html but is much harder to read and shoves the interview itself off onto a second, hard-to-find page.
FEED: The hacker community is full of very cantankerous and opinionated individuals. Have you gotten much grief for being so open about your Christian beliefs?
WALL: I've had no difficulty with it....I see God looking down on all these weird, cantankerous people, and kinda liking them, in an artistic fashion....There are certainly a bunch of what I would clearly label sinners out there....
if you are religious/spiritual, then you have to believe some phenomena are inexplicable, as they are performed/commanded by some entity we cannot comprehend
it just doesn't usually encourage the kind of inquisitive/iconoclastic/skeptical attitude that scientists need
and if you are doing research, it could also result in confirmation bias
why do you think it is not relevant? you could explain that instead of condescendingly accusing the OP of being condescending.
Do I? Because, if so, I'm doing it wrong.
I don't have to believe anything's inexplicable; in point of fact, I don't. That's not to say I think our puny little monkey brains are (presently) capable of understanding everything, but that's a completely different claim than that those things are inexplicable.
As for assertions, I'm not the party making one. You asserted that religious/spiritual folk "have to believe some phenomena are inexplicable". That's a universal claim, which can be refuted by any existential quantifier to the contrary. In simple predicate logic:
∀: All believers hold that some phenomena are inexplicable.
∃: I don't.
∴: Not all believers believe so.
So, net, in a lot of ways, we probably actually agree. I decry ignorance and superstition and the like pretty strongly, too. What I don't do is condescend, or paint with a brush broad enough to cover everyone in a class of humanity I seem not to have taken the time or effort to understand.
*i had originally asked for examples of phenomena
i don't think i need predicate logic notation to get that :D
the reason i said phenomena-inexplicable was because there are a lot of claims made by religions that were later found to be from other natural causes.
ex. in christianity:
- diseases were supposed to be curses and punishments till the germ theory was discovered
- creation story does not hold with modern evidence
- there are contradictions between biblical incidents and historic records(bethlehem census, great flood, etc.)
- the nature of heaven, hell, souls are supposed to be unanalysable
- without an understanding of astronomy, there are implications that heaven was located above the clouds(angels with wings, looking down from heaven, etc.)
- jesus had conducted exorcisms in the bible, they are considered silly now
so, professing to be religious and accept scientific discoveries at the same time seems difficult..
"What I don't do is condescend, or paint with a brush broad enough to cover everyone in a class of humanity I seem not to have taken the time or effort to understand."
there is a reason the debate _has_ to happen:
- accepting religious opinions as respectable has led to a majority of americans to consider evolution as untrue.
- education policies are being influenced to paint evolution as just-a-theory with undertones that it is a fringe group with a political agenda
- religious people who believe in and look forward to an armageddon have been in charge of a massive number of nuclear warheads
- stem cell research has been set back by almost a decade
- abortion clinic doctors have been shot
- the representative of god on earth has said 'child-molestation is bad, condoms are worse'
- the catholic church has systematically protected child-molesters under them
- the islamic world has become more extremised because the clever american government thought it would be a machiavelli move against the ussr. we know how that turned out
if the result is that people think atheists are condescending, small price to pay if we can get fewer people to blow each other up because their imaginary friend says so.
Do you think science will ever answer this question? The universe as a whole is on some level inexplicable, unless we somehow manage to transcend our existence in it...
Saying that a scientist's belief in God causes confirmation bias in his research results is more ad hominem and less productive criticism. Einstein believed in God, and in fact wrote extensively about the relationship he felt between God and his theories of the universe. Likewise many scientists lead productive careers without an iota of their religion (or family, or culture, or whatever have you) impacting the rigor of their work.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly." from http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691023689?ie=UTF8&tag=...
and a letter in which he wrote about his disbelief was auctioned a couple of years back: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/12/peopleinscienc...
i said "_could_ result in confirmation bias". that is, make confirmation bias more probable, not absolute..
""Why was the universe created?" Do you think science will ever answer this question?"
hopefully, some day, if we work towards it..
should we instead give up and resign ourselves to the fact that a wizard did it?
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
so he was.. agnostic?
"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment." from: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7921.html
are agnostics believers? you are still assuming einstein is infallible. einstein believing in god would not really prove the existence of god
he also did not believe in black-holes etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Einstein.27s_controver...
Can you still call yourself a Christian if you selectively edit the parts of the Christian faith you chose to hold? If so, how much?
Most people don't actually hold their beliefs up to scrutiny. And none of us can claim to be totally consistent. My impression is that most Christian "scientists" (not Christian Scientists, TM), are really Judeo-Christian ethicists, and culturally connected to a Christian community. But they have left a literal belief in the Christian canon far behind.
I also think the implied definition of what is religious and spiritual is pretty narrow, and seems to lend itself to monotheistic and/or abrahamic traditions. A lot of what people might say is 'spiritual' can end up being a lot more philosophical than mystical. The terms always end up being muddy, so I'm not saying that as a personal dig.
I would say that being human results in the confirmation bias. A marked understanding of it's psychological mechanism can perhaps reduce your susceptibility, but I'd need to see good research on the topic ;). It's a pretty fundamental heuristic.
I don't think the ideas of coding and Religion are by necessity parallel and intertwined. Perhaps one can draw a more distinct parallel between hard-line, rigorous Computer Science (Capital CS), and a complete inability to be 'spiritual' but I've been mostly referencing folks who show creativity in more peripheral areas, or at least in areas not directly related to Formal Research. I also think that people who are heavily involved in sciences, and still subscribe to Christianity, tend to deemphasize the parts of the bible that seem like fairy-tales, being much more liberal in cutting them out (see the bible Jefferson edited) while focusing on the interesting philosophical and ethical implications of the portions they deem more legitimate. I'm not 100% familiar with Larry Walls interpretation, but it seems pretty darn flexible.
I also don't know that a religious confirmation bias is going to translate into his coding ("My algorithm is fast. God must have made it that way"? ;)
I don't mind people disagreeing with theism, or talking about it. What I don't like is the implicit attitude, which can often be, "you believe in something other than pure hard science, and I don't, so I'm smarter."
I'm not saying that's the only version of the general sentiment, just that it's frequent enough.
But you're probably just too self-righteous to even read this inspiring post
unfortunate, because the usual representation of the believers in media are tea-partiers/creationists etc. or the ones who voted for bush because "he prays and asks god for his decisions, so he's good"
but it could also be because, to become a non-religious person from a religious person requires a _lot_ of reading/searching for answers(evolutionary biology, reading about other religions, cognitive-biases etc)
"But you're probably just too self-righteous to even read this inspiring post"
assertion without proof. ad-hominem. delusional.
Isn't that an a priori assumption that Larry's completely disregards his logical facilities in certain areas of his beliefs? Have you ever talked to him about what he believes and why? He might surprise you.
That reads to me like another a priori assumption.
Larry's one of the most humble people I've ever met--and one of the most startling. Just when you're sure you've finished thinking about something, he can come up with a different approach that works better (and is often a simpler synthesis of ideas I'd considered too far separate).
I wish I'd had the pleasure of being able to say the same thing about a George MacDonald or a G. K. Chesterton.
I don't think it's pragmatically relevant. I'm personally what you might call a soft-atheist, and I can tell you that when it comes down to brass tacks, my general disinterest in theism or atheism of any sort does little to inform my coding.
It does, however, seem fair to say that if Wall's self-assessment is to be believed, then at least some part of his personality and personal history, which ultimately led him to developing Perl, was tightly coupled with his experiences in Christianity. Of course, I'm not saying that Christianity is somehow responsible for Perl, or that it offered a unique addition in any metaphysical way. Perhaps a near religious interest in Harry Potter would have done the same thing. I'm saying that I value social and cultural diversity as much as nature values genetic diversity. For the most part, there is a large body that seems to generally be "right," but occasionally, from the outliers and mutations, you get something that is a novel and valuable contribution.
One thing that I love about my personal tendency toward atheism is that nothing is telling me I have to care at all about what someone else's spiritual beliefs are. I'm left blissfully capable of simply looking at what they have to offer humanity, while ignoring the things that I don't think are relevant. In this case, I think the relevance of walls contribution to the world of software development is patently obvious, and anyone who would defame that on some bogus spiritual grounds is, at best, looking to give themselves a quick public pat on the back.
I don't begrudge anyone their own personal beliefs. But say, perhaps, Larry had mentioned that he drew his inspiration from a 5" fairy who was constantly sitting on his shoulder. Would it not give you some pause, and amazment that an otherwise articulate and intelligent man, would have such a strange belief. However interesting or charming that may be, that's how I feel when I hear about taking enduring Christian beliefs well into adulthood.
The "greatness" of an invention isn't defined by the invention itself or even the inventor's state of mind, it's defined by how people react to it. That's what Wall meant when he talked about "designing a culture". Truly great inventions become that way because they draw people in; they're inclusive, and let people achieve all sorts of things that the original inventor may never have dreamed of.
That said, the varieties of christianity and their resemblance to 5" fairies is widely disparate. (I know I mentioned Deists as one possibly more rational variation). I don't want to fall into the trap of overgeneralizing about anything.
My points here are really pretty specifically related to people who clearly display extra-ordinary ability in one area, and are defamed because they hold interest or beliefs in another area that's only vaguely related.
If you were being more general, then I apologize for my snarky posts. Of course the irony has already been pointed out, seeing as I condescended on your perceived condescension. Humility has never been my strong suit ;) Something about the programmers virtues.. now wait.. who talked about those
So how is it that the human mind, while being so good at reasoning in one sphere, can be so easily defeated in another.
I have nothing against the culture or ethics of Christianity or Christians. I was raised and hold dear those ethical teachings, myself (well, some of them). It's just that it's historical myths are so obviously false - it literally does baffle me that their belief is still so pervasive in Western society (actually, much more in the US than European society).
a copy of the text: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefJesu.html
"Wall is also a serious evangelical Christian, a member (and webmaster) of the New Life Church's Cupertino Church of the Nazarene."
as well as some of his direct quotes in the interview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
[edited to put in a needed question mark]
I just didn't want to slap that label on him without knowing. Seems like you're ahead of me on that curve, heh
Could you elaborate on that a bit? My first instinct would be to assume you are talking about Jesus rising from the dead, but your words seem intentionally more general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
It's pretty easy to realize that all the miraculous tales from the bible are false - unless you've been indoctrinated since you were a child. Ehrman's works helped me to understand how the collection of ideas that became the Christian canon, were able to take root and spread.
The ideology is far from static and has evolved over time to address challenges to its validity and acceptance. I find the history of Christian thought to be a far more interesting topic than Christianity itself.
In understanding the malleability of Christian beliefs over time, it establishes that the roots were not handed down from God and set in stone, but fit nicely into into a very human framework of an adoption of a set of memes that have evolved and become institutionalized over time.
If the answer is yes, that's fine, but remember that you are taking that assertion on faith. There is simply no evidence one way or the other about what lies outside the bounds of human knowledge.
and why give weight to the ramblings of the religious but not to all schizophrenics?
shouldn't we give both views equal respect without calling to reason?
edit: referring to the "difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences/delusions/hallucinations" symptoms when i said schizophrenics
edited my parent comment to make it clearer
Exactly! And vice versa!
Who said anything about "giving weight" to "ramblings"? You are fixated on everything being about truth and facts and who's right, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Maybe you don't want anything bigger than observable facts and theories based thereupon in your life, but I hope when your parents say they love you you don't tell yourself that it's simply endorphins firing in their brains.
would you rather i countered an argument with untruths and lies?
what i'm trying to say is, if you are willing to give credibility to any assertion which is without proof, then you have to give an equal amount to credibility to _all_ assertions without proof
i.e, all religions equally, fairies, leprechauns, elfs, russel's teapot, a furry-god, Elvis still alive, alien-invasions and abductions, etc..
and problems arise then, if you give credibility to _all_ religions, there will be contradictions
- they have different creation stories and timelines
- multiple 'unique' prophets
- multiple 'chosen' tribe/people
etc..
If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith, then I don't think we can have a reasonable argument about anything.
And yes, the idea of using evidence as justification is itself an act of faith. This is not that extreme a position - take a look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for evidence (ironic, isn't it?) of that. At some point, you have to take some basic principles as given. Otherwise, you end up with circular reasoning.
The decision to slice the world into atheist vs. religious is itself a rather arbitrary one, just like how it's weird (when you think about it) that skin color has become the source of 500 years of hate, while nobody blinks twice (ha, ha) about someone's eye color. Why not slice the world into open-minded vs. close-minded people? There are open-minded theists (Wall is one of them) and close-minded atheists, just like there are close-minded theists and open-minded atheists.
I can only believe that those positions hold such a cherished part of his personally identity, that he is unable, or unwilling to do it.
For one thing, even the best philosophers and epistemologists have been unable to do so for millennia, all swell foops aside.
I remember, my first week of college, I had lunch with my advisor for the normal "how are things going?" chat. I said that I really liked my physics course, but I thought the psychology/neuroscience seminar was frustratingly vague. I liked that there was always a right answer in physics, but in psychology there're all these competing theories, and some experiments will point one way while others point the opposite. It was all a contradictory mess of evidence, and you seemingly couldn't draw any conclusions from it.
He replied that once you get to the higher levels of physics, it was like that too. (He'd done his Ph.D at Harvard as part of the team that won the 2001 Nobel Prize for discovering Bose-Einstein condensates.) There are not clear right and wrong facts, there's only data, and sometimes the data will point one way and sometimes it will point the other. And in order to make sense of that data, you need to be able to hold all the possible ideas, both right and wrong, in your head at once, so that you can sort them out.
I basically ignored him and then floundered through college. But once I got out and into the working world, I found that pretty much all the leaders I admired had this ability to hold multiple contradictory ideas in mind at once and yet still make a decision. And the authority figures I didn't respect lacked this ability, as did most of the people who never managed to rise into leadership positions. It was a pretty discomforting realization, since I wanted to move into a leadership position and yet my whole life up till then, I'd been seeking certainty in my intellectual life.
When you reach a contradiction, there're a couple of possible responses. You can go narrower, discarding the evidence that doesn't fit your hypothesis. This is the Ayn Rand approach - "Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is sure to be false." Or you can go deeper, unpacking each idea into its constituent parts and keeping those parts that you can reconcile between the two. This is the Hegelian synthesis.
It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but if you want to have a big impact on the world, your thinking has to encompass the world, including all the parts that don't fit with your preconceptions. If you limit yourself to faith, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those that themselves believe on faith, while if you limit yourself to evidence, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those who themselves believe in evidence. You've excluded half the world from being able to hold a dialogue with you.
That's why I mentioned Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions above. Kuhn's contribution was to document how prevailing scientific thought shifts over time. And he found that during periods of "normal science", scientists operate under the Randian paradigm - they sweep evidence under the rug that doesn't agree with the prevailing hypotheses. But once in a while, someone will come along that actually looks at the experimental results that have been recorded as anomalies, and instead of discarding them, turns them over in his head until they can be made to make sense with the existing body of evidence. Like Einstein and relativity. And then you have a paradigm shift, and the body of knowledge advances to include both the old laws and the new evidence that has been discovered.
> Holding onto faith in creationism and other religion-based myths is holding many people back from understanding what real evidence we have about the world.
When did I say that all religion was good or that faith never caused any harm? The thesis I was arguing against was that someone who has faith or mentions god is suddenly less capable of rationality.
> If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith
No this is not what I said. To paraphrase myself: There are ideas and concepts that go beyond physical reality, for which there is neither evidence for or against. People choose to believe one way or another for personal reasons, neither one is more rational. It makes a lot of self-proclaimed rationalist atheists wriggle and squirm, but if you truly believe that you can only believe things based on evidence, then you can not believe God does or doesn't exist, because God is a concept which is greater than our physical powers of observation.
Even if your try to invoke Occam's Razor, it all comes down to definitions, which of course is tough to pin down when it comes to something like God. You can define God literally as a bearded man in a throne and then it seems unlikely. You can define God as just one thing, anything, which is above our cognitive capacity, and then it seems likely.
And maybe you think I'm just playing games here, but I'm not. People are important. People's inspiration is important. Being able to say "I think there is a purpose to the universe" is an important thought to some people. Those people might even do great things that you admire (like, say, invent Perl). To come around and just flip the loony bit on because someone mentions the G word is not quite so cooly rational as said individual would like to believe.
I'm not here arguing for religion, I'm arguing for the fair judgement of an individual's true quality.
But I think Larry is not talking about this sort of metaphysical question. He believes, for example, that Jesus lived on earth and is the son of God. And notice how he tortures himself to simultaneously hold both a belief in evolution, and devine omnipotence. Its rather interesting to see.
As for me, I don't "want to believe" things. What I want is for the model in my head to match reality. To have reasons other than apparent truth for believing anything is to invite self-deception. It's hard enough to winnow out the nonsense our culture has saddled us with, without actually rooting for some of it.
I know from my own culture that one's personal image is usually the biggest factor when deciding. Atheists are pretty much outcasts in my culture.
The difference between a brilliant theist and a stupid one is that the brilliant one knows enough to know what they don't know. Larry's religion, while strongly held, is not a small-minded one. The Perl community is strikingly open-minded and diverse (there are many gay folks, at least a couple transgendered folks, a huge contingent of straight men wearing skirts, and all manner of folks who choose to live differently), and Larry not only accepts this diversity, he cultivated it that way. Larry is simply not what most atheists or agnostics think of when they think of "religious person".
I've been just as guilty of being intellectually self-righteous as anyone, but these days I see elitism of any status-quo as completely counter-productive when it comes to inspiring creativity and diversity. That said, it's hard not to slip back into it, heh.
I really enjoyed the article, and while I haven't been a Christian for some time, I'd be totally stoked to meet Larry some day. He sounds like a stand up guy.
Maybe I should start wearing a skirt.
YAPC is in North Carolina in June. You'll fit right in. I won't be wearing a skirt, but I'm weird enough on other counts (I live in a truck, for instance, and travel full-time).
Can you learn from their teachings? Yes. The same way you can learn from any other self-help book. The danger of religion is that it often comes loaded with a message that has been refined, over centuries, to become the perfect weapon of control over you.
For this reason, I have to agree with the original poster. Theists who buy into the above stories and others like them, do not impress me.
NB: This is of course referring to the Judeo-Christian God with a capital G, not the Deist "Supreme Architect" (which to me feels like a stepping stone for theists who feel kinda atheist but aren't ready to take the plunge yet) or the 'universe' that you feel a part of when you lose your sense of identity through drugs or meditation.
Also, spirituality and prayer aren't necessarily bad things. In Japan I bought what's essentially a talisman of the god of good entrepreneurial fortune and took it with me to job interviews. I didn't believe that it would actually increase my chances of getting a job, but it became part of my pre-interview ritual and it was somehow 'nice' to know that I'd taken it to all my interviews.
Hey! I'm a theist. Most of the time. I keep meaning to read Donald Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About." Has anyone here read/listened to it?
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/things.html "In the fall of 1999, computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science."