Science and False-Hoods in the Modern Age Part IV: Conclusion - E Pluribus Unum

I’m realizing it has been three months since I’ve written here. I try to make it monthly. If you’ve been following me on Facebook you hopefully know why I’ve been absentee – in brief my life was turned upside down and I unexpectedly bought a home and moved. I intend this post to be the exciting conclusion to my Science and Falsehood series.

Allow me to recap briefly. In Part one, I discussed what is academically referred to as nomothetic structures, which is basically the idea that there are multiple different ways to know and that each way of knowing rests on a specific set of assumptions (the bottom most turtle). I also introduced the idea of “The Tabacco Strategy,” in which poor science conducted outside of the main stream community lends an air of legitimacy to ideas/agenda’s that developed from other ways of knowing – using science for support of a pre-existing ideology rather than illumination of the facts. In part two, I applied these ideas examining the standards of care for Transgender teens released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and a statement released by the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). I focused on things that lend the AAP legitimacy such as clearly listing authors that includes several comities and subject matter experts and citing a number of reputable peer reviewed sources. I then examined ACPEds statement, noted that their authors did not have the integrity to put their names on their work, pointed out that their writing was inflammatory and vague and noted that most of their sources were webpages and other politically motivated platforms. I discussed how ACPeds is actually a political “Think Tank” with a very clear agenda attempting to wear a “False Hood” of legitimate science, all the while directly acting against scientific wisdom established through legitimate consensus among experts. This was a way of countering the “Tabacco Strategy” and showing how science actually works. Finally in part 3, I examined the actually teachings of Jesus and drew the following conclusions. 1) Jesus never said anything for or against “The Gays”, 2) Jesus encouraged us to love our neighbors and focus on bettering ourselves. 3) Jesus was violently apolitical and supported an anti-Semitic Roman government and in no way ever tried to force anyone to follow his teachings. Key phrases from this discussion were “Render unto Caesar” and “My kingdom is not of this World.”  Today I hope to tie everything together.

The ideas I’ve been writing about started my third semester of college when I took a philosophy and history of psychology course. That marinated until I went to graduate school and then it started a full simmer. My master’s thesis for my theology degree was going to be a melding of science and religion utilizing the idea of creating a hybrid nomothetic structure after a thorough examination of each individual ideological domain. There are a lot of reasons why I did not finish that project. Over time, I have come to believe that this project was doomed from the start because these two ways of knowing (there are many more, go check out hermeneutics if you want to blow your mind) are incompatible. Theology is based on a foundation of faith. It is an a prior type of knowledge. God gave everyone the answers from the start we just have to make everything fit into that worldview. This was the primary mode of scholarship I saw at BYU – every subject was filtered through the lens of “the gospel” philosophy, biology, art, history, everything was taught as if it was proof that Joseph Smith was a prophet and the LDS worldview was verifiable and correct. As I have aged, I have found faith to be a problematic way of knowing. At its, best faith allows us to hope when there is nothing left to hope in. At its, worst faith encourages us to ignore verifiable realities or formulate complicated stories to explain why the data does not fit with our a prior truth. Think of the pope censuring Copernicus, the ongoing “culture war” against the science of evolution and adaptation, or folks who believe the earth is 5,000 years old and dinosaur fossils are a hoax. These people’s faith allows them to deny centuries of verifiable facts because they conflict with their chosen worldview. As a well-known and respected LDS leader said while speaking in the church’s worldwide general conference “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.” In the context of faith denying, observable facts in favor of theological assertions is seen as a virtue of the highest order. In scientific circles this would be considered a heresy of the highest order. 

Science on the other hand is a posteriori, meaning occurring after an event – in this case observation and verification. Where the faithful assume all critical truth is already known, scientists assume they know very little, formulate a hypothesis, test it and then know a fraction more than they used to. Rinse, wash, repeat enough and you get a scientific theory that progresses away from error which is different from towards truth (remember Thomas Kuhn). These two approaches are fundamentally opposed. Theology demands that all things fit into the revealed truth gifted from God, science claims we can never know the truth and demands that our worldview shift and change with the available evidence. These ways of knowing are diametrically opposed.

For many years, I felt I had an answer in dialectical thinking. One of my primary therapeutic orientations is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).  In a very simplified nutshell dialectic thought argues that truth is not an either/or but a both/and. Capital T Truth for dialectic thinkers is reached through a process of tension and release between seemingly paradoxical ideas. Our job as truth seekers is to live in the tension created by holding both ideas. My favorite dialectic and the one I always use to teach the idea is “I am doing the best that I can” and “I am striving to be better” – this is the dialectic of acceptance and change. Any therapist worth their salt knows how to dance between these two opposing forces – validation, unconditional positive regard, compassion vs. challenging our clients to change. I’ve found this dialectic to be critical to my Transition and indeed my life. It is how we love ourselves while we also work towards change. From a dialectical perspective, we can hold both a scientific and theological worldview. Rather than seeking for a unified single nomothetic structure we choose to simultaneously ascribe to two (or more) ways of knowing and understanding the world around us. This is probably best exemplified by the statement “I’m not sure how evolution and the bible are both true but I know that they both operate in very real ways in the world.” This approach requires a humility of being willing to not know the truth, which also lends itself to a certain type of pragmatism. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is my other central therapeutic orientation.  Pragmatism is one of the key tenants of ACT. We encourage our clients not to focus on fighting with their thoughts or holding to thoughts that are True but rather to focus on thoughts that work for them. From this perspective, being functional is a greater virtue than being “objectively” true.

As I have pursed the issue further, from a pragmatic-dialectical perspective, I’ve come to believe that Theology in and of itself is not problematic – rather the most problematic ideologies are biblical literalism and the belief that ALL truth is contained in the bible (or scripture if you prefer). Biblical literalism supposes all things written in the bible to be literal realities. More than a theological document, the bible is first and foremost a retelling of actual events, a history of the world. For these people, God created the world in 7 days, the entire earth was flooded while Noah was in the Ark, and God and Satan who are real entities gambled with Job’s life and livelihood just to prove a point. Biblical literalism is why people believe the earth is 5000 years old (or the center of the universe), don’t believe in dinosaurs, and push back against evolution. The other problematic point of view is that everything the bible says is true and everything true is in the bible. This point of view holds that a collection of documents mostly Transcribed from an oral tradition, held secretly by monks and Translated throughout the centuries, has no errors or inconsistencies in it. The position of faith is that God would not allow any corruption of “his word.” If you are LDS, you believe the bible is corrupted but deny that any equivalent corruption could have occurred to the LDS scriptures. For me, these both set up a capricious and problematic God figure. For starters, let’s look at the story of Job – can we really trust that an all knowing all loving God would put one of his children through excessive trauma and loss just to prove a point? Theoretically, God should know what Job would do without testing him. This feels abusive and manipulative. That is not a God I want to worship. The second ideology assumes that this all powerful God will watch over his “word” and ensure that not one “jot or tittle” is altered, but wouldn’t lift a finger to stop slavery, genocide or war. The God of that “reality” seems to have his priorities out of order if you ask me. It seems like that God is fine with torture and suffering but unbelievably obsessed with the smallest most private aspects of obedience to his commandments that are so precious he preserved them exactly the way he wanted them to be.

Alternatively, one may remain faithful without espousing these points of view. For me, I have come to see scripture – all scripture – as collections of mythology and allegory that speaks towards morality and spirituality. Scriptures are concerned with defining what Greek thinkers called “the Good” or “The Good Life.” From this perspective, Job is a metaphorical story about faith, not a true history. Ironically, it was a Jewish friend who introduced me to this way of looking at things and Job was the story he used to teach me. From this mytho-alagorical perspective, there is no conflict between science and religion because they are speaking to two completely different spheres of knowledge. Scripture speaks of things that are “not of this world” of how to live a moral, ethical life and be a good person. Science describes the natural world and attempts to describe “Natural Laws” that govern the way the physical world works. These are very different ways of knowing about very different things. This is a great place to stop the train of thought for those of my readers who wish to maintain their faith. As an apostate to the faith of my birth my thinking obviously went further.

The same Jewish friend/teacher that taught me about Job also helped me examine my relationship to my own faith. The point that he made is that all religions start with a great teacher who teaches things that change people’s lives. When that teacher dies people attempt to preserve their words and build up institutions to ensure the continued practice and existence of the teacher’s teaching. Often times, this leads to a cult of personality or the actual deification of the teacher. For my teacher, the point is that all religions unavoidably have a certain amount of corruption/abuse “baked in to the cake” – and one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. From his stance the teachings (scriptures), are true but the institutions can be problematic. This too is a stopping point that allows one to maintain a certain type of faith. “The Gospel is true – the church is made of flawed people.”

I took things a step further and concluded that all religions and scriptures become corrupted over time and religion itself has become an instrument of oppression and control used by powerful and “conspiring” men to consolidate their own power and dominate/exploit the masses. From my current position, I trust science as a field that attempts to find objectivity and I mistrust religion as a tool of oppression and exploitation. I do hold to my spirituality and seek to find what truths I can in traditions and scriptures – for me those truths are pragmatic truths not capitol “T” truths. I identify as a spiritually eclectic witch or pagan for short. From this position, both my scientific understanding and my spiritual understanding are free to change with whatever evidence or knowledge presents itself. Neither my spiritual understanding or my scientific understanding is an infallible truth so any inconsistencies within or between these ideologies is a limit of my understanding and not an existential crisis. It is less certain than the old way but it is way more comfortable and pragmatically much more useful.

At this point, I have presented several valid and appropriate ways of allowing theological and scientific ways of thinking to co-exist within a single individual’s worldview. I would now like to examine ways in which these ideas may apply to society at large. Can theological and scientific people co-exist in a single society? Or perhaps more pertinent to the point, can Trans people exist in a Christian society that views the gender binary and traditional gender roles as sacred pillars of social order?

Before I answer that question, I need to take note of the fact that public discourse is not really touching on this issue at all. The current conversation seems to be whether or not Trans people do actually exist as a biological, phenomenological reality or are they merely the result of ideology intended to confuse and combat the sacred traditional (read that Christian) ideals. Rupert Murdock and company over at Fox would have you believe that “Gender Ideology” and “The Trans Agenda” are a newfangled liberal conspiracy to corrupt and molest (read that as “groom”) good Christian children. I’d like to notice first that this discussion centers a certain set of cis-normative, heteronormative perspectives and tends to rely on the wisdom of what a particular individual currently knows without looking at the broader world. This is the “God has given us all the knowledge we need approach.” There is a certain naivety, and I would argue danger, in assuming something is brand new because one has not been aware of it yet.    

Even a precursory examination of well documented history reveals that Trans people have been present in society for a very long time. Christine Jorgensen shows us that Trans people have been present in the popular media and popular consciousness long before this present moment, the 1950’s in fact, https://wams.nyhistory.org/growth-and-turmoil/cold-war-beginnings/christine-jorgensen/ Marsha P. Johnson demonstrates that Trans people have been vital participants from the start of the modern LGBTQ  rights movement https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson and Hurculin Barbin demonstrates that gender variance was in the popular conscious and scientific studies as early as the mid 1800’s https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/herculine-barbin. At this point, I am just citing the  more notable and recent examples of Trans/gender non-conforming folx who are relevant to main stream popular history.

Take a moment to examine this statue from ancient Greece. This is a statue of the goddess Hermaphroditus yes the Greeks had mythology about Trans women and statues to match! The verifiable facts are that historical documents refer to gender divergent people as far back as we have historical records; presumably, Trans folx have been present as far back as humans have existed. Here are some resources on this for the curious https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/outinoxford-ash-hermaphroditus  https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-html/  https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/betancourt_Transgender_lives.pdf . The verifiable fact is that Trans folx have existed forever and will continue to exist well into the future. To deny this fact is the equivalent of claiming the world is flat, or the center of the universe or denying that evolution exists. Do people do it? Sure they do. People hold all sorts of crazy and incorrect ideas. That doesn’t mean we have to treat them as credible or give them equal airtime. The reality is some ideas are based on verifiable facts and others are based on traditions. Denying verifiable realities in order to cling to a tradition may help you feel safer; however, I suggest you double check things before you go jumping off buildings to prove gravity doesn’t exist.   

The historical documents tend to indicate that the gender binary is a relatively new idea that has been utilized to bolster the suppression of women and minorities. I’ll provide one example. One of the justifications for slavery was that people from Africa were judged to be more androgynous, lacking the physical features Europeans associated with the different genders. Development of (European) binary gender was perceived as more evolved and a sign that the Europeans were racially superior to other races that lacked the European specific gendered traits. Not only did this justify slavery, but it justified the eradication of most two spirit genders from indigenous communities. When one understands the immutable reality of Trans existence throughout time, the discussion must shift from “should Trans people exist” to “how and where Trans people should exist”. Many indigenous and ancient cultures saw Trans people as inhabiting a unique niche and elevated them to positions of honor such as priest or teacher. 

I believe the principals the American founders aspired to provide powerful answers to all the questions I have been asking. How and where should Trans people exist and how to exist with people who think and act differently from you. Freedom to think and worship according to one’s own conscious was so important it was written into the constitution. The founders envisioned a pluralistic society in which many different people with many different worldviews worked together to build a society where everyone was free. This society/country was founded on the belief that all “mankind” have the God given birthright of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”    

Pictured above is the first legally circulated American coin. Notice the motto there – “mind your business.” “In God We Trust” didn’t happen until the 1950’s. https://www.govmint.com/coin-authority/post/why-do-coins-say-in-god-we-trust. The national motto up to that point is the one that still appears on the penny “E Pluribus Unum”, out of many one. This is one example, the point I am making is the founding fathers envisioned a diverse pluralistic society and that Christianity is an overlay that came into play during the cold war. Living with people you don’t agree with is as easy as “mind your business” or “render unto Caesar.” Understand that all people have the right to be alive, to be free and to pursue what makes them happy. For Trans folx, that literally means having the freedom to have access to the necessary gender affirming care. We know that Trans people, especially Trans teenagers, who are denied gender affirming care have a tendency to un-alive themselves. Denying medical care compromises these people’s freedom (liberty) to dictate their own medical care, it threatens their lives, and it certainly interferes with their ability to purse their happiness. Ultimately, mind your own business, let Trans people live their lives, and stop restricting their freedoms. It’s what Jesus would have done and it is what the founding fathers would want. It is the American way.  At the end of the day the answer to “how to live with people we don’t agree with” is a simple time honored tradition of living your life and letting others live their own. Not everyone has to live in accordance with your personal worldview and legislating that they do is un-American and un-Christian.

In graduate school I had a Korean friend whose grandmother had never acculturated and learned English after immigrating to this country. She spent the rest of her life here in America living in a small area of LA known as K-town. This neighborhood functions as if someone picked up a piece of Korea and dropped it in LA. All of the signs are written in Korean, the shops sale Korean food and wares and the people all speak Korean. This Grandma was able to live her life without having to change too much or go out her comfort zone while her children and grandchildren reaped the benefits available in America. Los Angeles is this way. There is a “Little Ethiopia” and a “Chinatown.” Expatriate communities in LA have bonded together to create communities where they feel comfortable. When they need to, these people can leave their smaller communities and inhabit public spaces such as the public education system. This is the American dream – “from many one”. In theory, public spaces are spaces in which all are welcome and all are safe – they are a “community good” shared by all dominated by none.    

This is how I live my life now – in a precious queer bubble. While there is no “Queer town”, there are places that are known to be queer friendly or explicitly queer. These are the places I spend my life. Especially when I am out with my friends. A group of Transfeminine folx is like a herd of bunnies – we are acutely aware of our location on the food chain and do our very best to be safe. Me and my girlfriends stick to places that at least one of us have vetted or places that are explicitly known to be queer.  There are very few places I end up rubbing shoulders with “the straights” – primarily the grocery store, my job and my children’s school. When inhabiting these spaces, I am careful to manage my image and hide aspects of my identity. I am also conscious of the fact that I have every right to inhabit these public spaces.

This seems to be the real crux of the issue we are up against – who rules the public spaces. There is a contingency of folks who believe that “This is a Christian nation” and “Our way of life is under attack.” These people do not want to share the public spaces with people like me. They fear that the mere existence or mention of a Trans person or a gay family will somehow turn their children gay/Trans. They are striving – in the name of “family values”- to push queer people out of public spaces. They make laws that make it difficult for us to exist, strive to ban books with characters that resemble us, and boycott movies with the slightest suggestion of queerness.  In their minds, they are defending their values which they believe are under attack. A prime example of this to me is the supposed “war on Christmas.” Somewhere along the line, these people have conflated the existence of alternative points of view with out right ideological warfare. Queer people are not demanding Christians cease celebrating Christmas, praying or living in traditional family units. We are simply asking that we can also celebrate our own holidays, worship our Gods and live our values. Another simple example of this is the idea of “white genocide” or “replacement theory”. The mere existence of other ethnicities is seen as an existential threat to “whiteness.” These ideas conflate existence of alternatives with decline of the status quo. Queer people existing and being represented in no way curtails the existence or representation of Christian people. This is what we are asking for plain and simple, allow us space give us a seat at the table. The trick is “space” in public spaces isn’t like pie. Allowing me and my family to exist in no way stops you and your family from existing we can co-exist. There is no war on Christians or whites – the war is on Christian White supremacy. Our assertion is that public spaces for too long have been Christians and white dominated public spaces. We are simply asking that they live like the rest of us inhabiting their group specific spaces for their group specific things and coming together with everyone else for public things. All we are asking for is that the majority start living like the rest of us and allow space for people who do not belong to the majority.

At the end of the day, the real answer to the conundrum of science and theology is to allow for a peaceful co-existence of both ideas and people. As truth seekers and life livers we do not need to force all ideas and people to conform to a single cohesive narrative. It is more pragmatic and effective to allow the co-existence of ideas and people. Perhaps these ideas and people spend the most of their time in their unique and specific spaces or silos; that is not necessarily bad, as long as we allow them to  peacefully co-exist when they enter into shared spaces acknowledging that the existence of one does not necessitate a threat to the existence of the other.