Cornelia Dean, in today’s New York Times, has a collective review of a number of new books about the relationship between science and belief in Santa Claus. Here’s the key graf:
Of course, just as the professors of Christmas spirit cannot prove (except to themselves) that Santa Claus exists, the advocates for secular holidayism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that Santa does not exist.
This is the crucial point that can’t be emphasized enough in discussions of the Christmas problem. These scientists, always talking about how they can “prove” this or that about the universe. But, if they’re honest, they admit that they can’t prove Santa doesn’t exist. Sure, we’ve had people up at the North Pole looking around, and they didn’t see any evidence of his workshop. But the belief in an actual physical workshop, right there on the ice and with elves and whatnot, is just a colorful remnant of an earlier, less sophisticated Christmasology. Today we understand that Santa is an ineffable spirit, who doesn’t directly intervene in the physical realm (except for Christmas eve, of course). Science and Christmas should be understood as distinct and non-overlapping realms of inquiry; they may work together, but can never come directly into opposition. And yes, there’s good evidence that many presents are actually brought out by parents rather than by Kris Kringle himself, but it seems implausible that all of them are. Santa is just a more elegant hypothesis.
Most of all: without the transcendent moral guidance that Santa provides, how will we know which children are naughty, and which are nice? Are we supposed to leave that up to individuals and communities to decide? Without Santa’s equitable system of rewards and punishments (coal), there would be no reason whatsoever for kids to behave themselves. They would just run around, tearing wings of of flies, setting schools on fire, murdering their enemies. No matter what you might think about the empirical case for and against the existence of Santa, we can all agree that the world is a better place if we believe in him.
PZ has more.
Santa, of course, brings more presents to rich kids than to poor kids, teaching a valuable lesson about the equivalence of moral worth and material wealth. But gift-giving at Christmastime is a tradition that Christians stole from the Pagans, back when Pope Gregory I told his missionaries to re-brand Pagan traditions as Christian. The Pagans were well-attuned to the natural world, and knew that as the Solstice approached, the sun was sinking lower and lower in the sky. They believed that through an intense flury of forth-quarter consumer spending, the invisible hand of the market economy would pick up the sun and move it higher in the sky. Which is more or less what everyone believes these days.
After a fine run of entertaining and informative posts, CV falls back on the old standby, cheap God-baiting. I know things are a bit tighter in the US than in Europe; nonetheless you are hardly risking a starring role down the next auto da fe. Woit – strings R knot us – has more neck than you guys when you get down like this. Either you don’t believe, and it’s all bollocks and you don’t need telling, or you do, and this sort of stuff won’t do a thing, other than confirm that cosmologists and their stringy fellow travellers are damned.
Rant over.
Thank goodness global warming is melting the north pole. Soon we will root Santa out of his frozen spiderhole.
thm,
To be perfectly candid, I’m at a total loss for constructing a finer comment than your…Therefore, I’ll refrain from elaborating upon your comment and simply savor in it…
Thanks!
Cynthia
Curry’s Paradox is usually demonstrated by giving a “proof” of Santa’s existence. 🙂
A post about Santa in the summer? The war on christmas is starting early this year!
🙂
There is something about this story in today’s ONION that presents some evidence that these sorts of investigations are necessary in order to weed out the unbelievers from the faithful (all those little girls named Virginia).
Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass
Mysterious Phenomenon Kills Millions Each Year
July 25, 2006
PIERRE, SD—Sparrow Aviation Administration officials are calling the Monday collision of an westbound sparrow with the window of a Mitchell, SD home a clear case of “controlled flight into glass,” after the bird failed to detect a transparent windowpane directly in his flight path.
Howard R. Trojanowski, a Pierre-bound, 2-year-old field sparrow who had been licensed to fly since two weeks after he was hatched and had logged over 60,000 flying hours, departed from a ledge near Sioux Falls Regional Airport at 11:04 a.m. CST. Trojanowski never reached his intended tree branch, instead striking a tempered-glass picture window 2.5 miles northwest of Mitchell 74 minutes after takeoff at an estimated speed of 39 mph.
There were no survivors.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50901
> Either you don’t believe, and it’s all bollocks and you don’t need telling, or you do, and this sort of stuff won’t do a thing
Wrong. Religion is ultimately a choice, and to make an informed choice you need to understand the opposing arguments. My childhood was chock full of Christian indoctrination with absolutely zero exposure to atheistic arguments, and I think I had a fairly typical Catholic childhood. It was simple arguments like this post that eventually undid all of that, and I have nothing but gratitude towards Sean and others for saying what needs to be said. The world is full of proselytizers on the one side, preying on those who sit on the fence. My neighborhood priest wouldn’t hesitate to sweet-talk someone into belief, why should my neighborhood cosmologist be silent on the issue?
I remember that discovering the truth about Santa precipitated a religious crisis for me as a child. I was peeking in my parent’s Dr. Spock book (figuring that if that was where they were learning how to raise me, I needed to know what was in it), when I was horrified to discover a chapter on what to tell your kids about Santa.
For me, the issue was that I’d started to become seriously suspicious about the whole Jesus/God business, which sounded suspiciously like another one of those ridiculous notions that grown-ups seemed to have. The only tangible evidence that I’d been able to discern that any of that miraculous stuff ever really happened was the the magical appearance of presents under the Christmas tree. Needless to say, discovering that Santa was a fraud cast the whole package into doubt. I even spent a few weeks trying to convince myself that Dr. Spock was wrong, so I can sort of understand why some people reject Darwin with such desperation.
Let’s say I ask one of these oh-so-stubborn believers in Santa why they still believe in Him after all this time. A usual reply is something like this: “Every Christmas I wake up and I see the happiness and wonderment in my children’s eyes and I have an overwhelming emotional response. I experience Santa in my everyday life.” As a man of science my first reaction may be to say this person’s emotional response does not show that some being Santa exists out there in the real world. But the Santa-believers have already conceded that point. (On a side note such concessions- changing beliefs once empirics show a former view was wrong- are an important part of some things other than Santa-belief. I don’t fault science or dismiss Electromagnetism for having believed in the ether in the past). So everyone has already admitted that they don’t really know what the hell Santa is, but what they can say about Santa is that the experiences they have described affirm His existence. I have also had such emotional experiences on Christmas morning, and while I do think that if you want to land on the moon or figure out the laws governing our universe, you should really listen to reason rather than emotion, I can’t really say that those emotional experiences are meaningless or signify nothing. And I also think that science, at least at this point, doesn’t have a whole lot to say about those feelings. If somebody wants to use the word Santa to describe them and wants to try to talk to others about it, I don’t have a problem with it. Of course, if they start asking me to start wars because He told them to or to teach school children about how Rudolf’s nose is what really powers the sun, then I would have a problem.
Santa and Jesus are fairly good guys, all told. Their merger is how the do-good message of Jesus is corrupted by Catholic capitalism. Jesus isn’t actually behind the major icons of Christmas and Easter (Santa, eggs) which are pagan. There is virtually no correspondence between the teachings of Jesus and the Catholic Church (my religion). So don’t blame Jesus for everything!
There should be no indoctrination with religious propaganda based on falsehoods, mythology, and unchecked facts. But most kids can quickly find out that “films” of Santa raising the dead or walking on water are suspect. A far bigger danger than recognised religion is unofficial, unrecognised religion, cloaked by pseudoscience (worship of mainstream $tring theory).
Don’t forget Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. As it was written, “If you believe hard enough…”
ROFLAPIMYP!
Hey, make fun of nonexistent gods all you want, but don’t mess with the Tooth Fairy.
Tell me, Sean: when you fond out there was no Santa, did it make you any better? Or any wiser?
It certainly made me wiser, in that I understood more accurately how the world works. “Better” is a judgment call, of course — but all else being equal, it’s better to be correct than incorrect, yeah.
Or any wiser?
It sure as hell made me wiser! I learned that I couldn’t trust anyone, not even my parents!
Lewis Wolpert, quoted in the third from last paragraph:
Odd that Ms. Dean seems to agree with this sentence, but unconciously draws a line at changing belief in god/gods.
I don’t recall how I found out about Santa being false. But I damn well proved the tooth fairy was a lie all on my own. Legos baby, legos. scatter those on the ground and the unsuspecting “tooth fairy” (my dad at the time) would have to make one hell of an effort not to blow his cover by screaming like a little girl (which he failed to do).
Santa may not exist as a real person, but he is definitely an imaginary one. That may mean there is a theory, a real mathematical space time one, which matches Santa’s existence in the imaginary world. Like all your fairy tale physics. It’s funny, don’t you think! That theoretical physics seem to match fairy tales. Say E=MC2; The emperor’s new clothes, the title of the story, after which string theory pops up and you get the story, string’s woven into fabrics (branes) which then are used to produce clothes (manifolds) and if the story came first, you would have still come up the title. I guess this is the story so far, but there is a lot more to the story… Does this story hold the key to the future of theoretical physics? The emperor has still yet to make his appearance in the parade… Wearing his brand new clothes. So who is the emperor? Pinocchio, Santa or the country where the finished theory originates? Is some 5 year old going to stand up and say “dudes… the emperor is naked! He has nothing on at all”. But all of this just proves a future point; Santa can be proved real because you can prove that, he is not wearing any clothes. I think the point is… Not, is there a Santa? But who is Santa? And why can’t we see our presents?
They can’t be many races in the universe, that’s spent one hundred years writing a fairy tale out in mathematics without knowing it, that’s beautiful! In a few hundred million years you might actually have made a movie 🙂
Can wait to see Perseus kill the Gorgon Medusa using his mirrored shield… Or have I seen that one already?
Qubit
And here I thought I was controversial trying to use Maxwell’s Equations to understand women.
Don’t make light of that.