Science and hate for religion: a personal anecdote

John McCarthy

Since 1995, Internet has become an almost indispensable tool for many people. Our society is increasingly dependent on the global data network, which means that we are increasingly vulnerable. A solar flare, a large meteorite, an overload of energy networks, a major war, can endanger our social structure, making it impossible to use Internet.

In the late 1980s, Internet was just a fledgling network linking together private companies, whatever their hardware and software. In fact, it was one among many networks competing for the new ecological-social niche. One of the most important of these networks was BITNET, which linked all the universities in North America using IBM computers. Later, a parallel network was created in Europe, called EARN, which was soon connected to BITNET.

As a member of the IBM Scientific Center installed at the Autonomous University of Madrid since 1972, I participated in almost all the advances that took place in information and communication technologies during those years. I used email since the early eighties. Shortly after, I began to participate in international scientific discussion forums through EARN-BITNET. One of these was the AI forum, where we discussed the current situation and future prospects of this discipline with the main researchers of the time in that field, such as John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky.

John McCarthy was one of the participants in the seminar held in 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover (U.S.A.), where the name artificial intelligence was invented. Marvin Minsky became famous during the 1970s by proving, together with Seymour Papert (the designer of the LOGO language), that the artificial neural networks of the time couldn’t solve the exclusive-OR function, one of the simplest in existence. This finding was responsible for neural network research stalling for nearly a decade. I talked about this in another post.

Despite his scientific solvency, in our AI forum discussions, Marvin Minsky proved to be somewhat of a fanatic atheist. When one of the participants in a discussion implied that he was a believing scientist, Minsky attacked him with the following blunt statement:

Religion was discredited when Giordano Bruno was burned.

This outburst by Minsky had four almost simultaneous responses, which more or less said the same thing. Three of them said this:

If religion was discredited when Giordano Bruno was burned, then science was discredited by the experiments of Nazi doctors on the Jews.

I was the author of the fourth reply. I said this:

If religion was discredited when Giordano Bruno was burned, then science was discredited by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Actually, neither religion nor science were discredited by these things; only people are responsible for their actions, not abstract entities like science or religion. Theories are discredited by negative evidence or by reason.

No one reacted to the first three responses. Mine, on the other hand, received a lot of criticism. On the one hand, the Americans who participated in the forum (which were the majority) were offended by my example. While attacking the Nazis rarely provokes resistance, many Americans argued that the destruction of two Japanese cities and the killing of over a hundred thousand noncombatants by atomic bombs was justified.

Another group of participants (including John McCarthy) attacked the second part of my answer. From the ensuing discussion, which was quite lengthy, I hope it became clear that three things need to be distinguished:

1. Man is the cause and responsible for human acts, which can be good or bad.
2. Entities or social institutions such as the Government, the Church or a University, made up of groups of human beings, which can be jointly responsible for their actions.
3. Abstract entities such as science and religion, which cannot be assigned moral responsibility, but should not be used to justify our actions, which should be judged according to their consequences.

Another thing that became clear in the discussion was the ignorance of my opponents about what the Church says. McCarthy, for example, said that the Catholic Church claims to be protected by God from doing evil. Many of my contributions to this debate tried to debunk patently false claims like this.

It is curious that some atheists, who deny our freedom, and therefore responsibility for our actions, often hold believers accountable for things those atheists don't like (such as the execution of Giordano Bruno), in a blatant display of inconsistency, which they probably don't realize.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca