Donald Knuth is a Stanford academic, a serious Lutheran Christian, and a liberal. For any of those three types of people, these viewpoints are unsurprising. I share them, too, but I feel queasy about an HN headline that says "Respect", as if it were contemptible to hold a different viewpoint.
He's a Stanford Emeritus and one of the most beloved computer scientists of all time. This isn't exactly the riskiest page he could have put up (though, if I wanted to be snarky, there's a wisecrack or two to be conjured about professing Christianity, right?).
But at the end of the day, of course I'm glad he has this page. Like I said, these are my viewpoints --- for the most part --- too. But I'm uncomfortable with the way we've chosen to promote the page here.
I sort of wonder how atheists process someone like him believing in God. Is he being irrational? Is he just foolish in this one area of his life? Is it hurting his life (as many atheists claim religion is)? And if any of those are true do you feel like you have the intellectual authority or capacity to say anything to him about his own life?
Certainly not. It’s interesting to see what, well, intellectuals think about all kinds of topics (still not sure whether that makes it HN material) and I very much believe that Donald Knuth can say more intelligent things about religion and politics than the average person but it is well outside his (and my) area of expertise.
>I sort of wonder how atheists process someone like him believing in God.
Cognitive dissonance.
I kid, I kid: but I see too many atheists happy to deride a viewpoint with that pop-psychology term as a means of writing it off. Qualifying a behavior as inherently rational or irrational runs the risk of functioning rather like a dogma.
I personally do not really care. Faith is a personal matter. As long as we are not discussing it directly, why should it factor into a political conversation? Einstein was deeply religious, down to refusing to accept quantum theory because "god does not play with dice", but he also had things to say. Would it have made his discoveries more wonderful if he was an atheist? I believe that question is devoid of meaning.
Well many atheists claim that being an atheist is a qualification for being a serious scientist. Sam Harris wrote a pretty poorly thought out piece in the NYT about how a person who is otherwise qualified was not a good candidate because of their faith.
As someone who has education in science, but never 'got religion' as a child, I see atheism as the null hypothesis.
One way of formulating it would be: "There is(are) no all-powerful supernatural entity(ies) which has(ve) influence over my daily life."
No one has given me sufficient evidence that would go against this and contradict the null hypothesis, so I continue to not believe in God(s).
That said,
I don't think that believing things that are not scientifically proven/provable disqualifies one from performing scientific research. I'm know I have plenty of opinions/beliefs/biases that I couldn't back up for the life of me. It is part of being human and having been raised in a given environment. But it is important to be aware of your own biases in any endeavor.
Your logic would apply equally well with theism as the null hypothesis ("There is(are) an all-powerful supernatural entity(ies) which has(ve) influence over my daily life, but (s)(t)he(y) have been playing a game called science for the past few centuries")
I think agnosticism would be the better choice for a null hypothesis.
I'm fine with people believing in some sort of entity, I do have a problem if they actually adhere to an organized religion.
You can't definitely prove there is no god, but you can certainly show how dumb the concept of organized religion is, especially the books they rely on.
but you can certainly show how dumb the concept of organized religion is
Really? It seems to me that the concept of organized religion seems very useful even if there is no god. It actually might be most useful if there is no god.
I understand the need that people feel to be part of communities, that's perfectly normal. It doesn't mean you need to adhere to a book that was written by goat herders a few thousands of years ago.
Being a theist of course does not preclude you from being a good person.
However, spreading theism, being a role model, teaching it to children who may not grow up to be college professors but merely ordinary people, is an idea under some amount of debate.
To what extent does Knuth believe in God? For all I know, he might be a Christian atheist. Such people do exist, at the extreme Spongian end of the church.
It's the obligation of the intellectual elite to point out fallacies, inaccuracies and problems of the governing body of a country. There's a long tradition of this, from Noam Chomsky to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
To qoute Emerson "Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well." Intellectuals have the wisdom, and the brave ones speak truth to power.
It is ironic that Knuth fumes about his personal lack of consent for the Iraq War (which was authorized and funded by dozens of votes in Congress) and in the same breath calls for imposing the legal rule of an unelected international criminal court on his fellow Americans.
Americans, a self-governed people, have established a proven system of rights and freedoms in our Constitution, and that sovereignty should not be transferred to international bodies -- particularly when those bodies are controlled by groups that plan to use the courts against U.S. and Israeli soldiers.
It is ironic that Knuth fumes about his personal lack of consent for the Iraq War (which was authorized and funded by dozens of votes in Congress) and in the same breath calls for imposing the legal rule of an unelected international criminal court on his fellow Americans.
Actually read it again. He says no such thing. He says those are questions and then explicitly says he has no good answers for any of the questions, except maybe one of them (not one that you mention). Saying that this is a question that we should have a real discussion over is neither calling nor fuming.
"War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press."
When considered against thousands of years of human history, documenting wars large and small, and the events leading up to them, such a view of the innate goodness of fellow man that is pure and would never wage war but for the corrupting influence of the elite, comes off as incredibly naive.
When compared and contrasted with, for example, Machiavelli and his discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius, Einstein comes off like an episode of the Care Bears.
If a country's honor as a concept is ludicrous, why should a country bother to be moral?
Surely you can see that honor and morality are closely tied concepts, such that a country's moral actions define its honor. In what respect can someone deny the validity of honor and still evaluate the quality of a country's actions?
I don't think you can generalize much about a group of three hundred million people. If you accept that premise, then there just isn't very far you can go when talking about a country's honor or morality.
The people calling the shots in a country might be a small enough group to make statements about their honor or morality meaningful -- but then statements like "my country" don't mean too much either.
I think the Powers That Were (and largely continue to Be) in the US have probably done wrong by many people living in Iraq, although I'm less sure about this than I used to be.
These are moral questions. There are equally perplexing related practical questions, such as: Why did we go into Iraq? Wars are typically fought for vengeance or gain. There was really nothing to avenge and clearly nothing has been gained. I'm chocking the war up to pure foolishness.
This page seems rather silly. He isn't actually espousing any views; he's saying he doesn't have any answers. You may read the questions as implying his views, but he doesn't explicitly state any opinions on the matter.
I'm not sure why this is even on HN, even given its author.
" Is it possible for potential new leaders to raise questions about their country's possible guilt, without committing political suicide?"
Well we did get the whole "apology tour" stuff on the tv and radio with Obama and by then he wasn't a "potential new leader", but perhaps the answer is yes? (at least it's not a no)
