SLOBS: In Defense of the Indefensible

First a disclaimer: This is not about slobs in the commonly accepted meaning of the word nor is that connection entirely non-existent. So, I suggest that you just keep on reading.

September 25, 2014: Just days ago I was at a conference where we were parsing the philosophic themes in the Guru Granth sahib. When my turn came to speak the Session Chair, Reshma whom I have known for close to a decade, surprised me when she pulled an almost 50 years old nugget from my life. She reminded listeners that a generation ago my cohorts and I had founded a chapter whimsically named "SLOBS." I was then a graduate student at the medical school in Oregon, and possibly the only Sikh in town among a small of Indians. The Vietnam War and Civil Rights struggle consumed the nation; it was a different world then.

Every Friday evening after a full week of classes and research a bunch of us, numbering 10 to 20, from a variety of academic disciplines in experimental biology would congregate for the ritual hanging out at the local joint, The Cheerful Tortoise. The banter was not purposefully anti-intellectual but nor was it always pretentious, serious or productively directed.

It lightened our burdens even though, at times, we also tackled issues of science or life that rankled us. Most of us, in our twenties to some slightly older, did what young people do - debated and parsed the problems that plague life and the world with an assurance and authority that, as the years would teach us, was entirely unfounded.

I was seriously into science then; my immersion into matters of faith and belief was to come later. We often dissected the faith that marks most religious disciplines, but usually not too kindly.

And our conclusions supported our collective bias that religious belief was faith housed in a hard shell of bias; only science was objective enough to be worthy of our loyalty, love and devotion. So we did the reasonable thing; we conjured up a group, Society for the Lack of Objectivity in Biological Sciences, that gave us the seductively ideal acronym SLOBS. In many ways, in our mind and body, we young bucks were the persona of the acronym already.

All this seems to have been ages ago, in a different life. Reshma had touched a chord and I write today as an erstwhile founder-member of SLOBS.

I stand now astride the habits and cultures of two seemingly opposing poles - scientific discipline and the life of faith. It took me almost half a century to reconcile the two and realize the truth behind our acronym.

Spirituality speaks of a reality that our senses cannot perceive and our intellect cannot fully fathom but with which our soul can commune. Such truths transcend our substantial but limited and finite measuring devices and faculties. Not surprisingly they fail when applied to matters that are infinite by definition. We speak of man having been created by God in his own image but the truth is that we humans fell into the expected trap of reducing God to a human image - somewhat capricious, arbitrary and open to flattery. We seem to have framed and created God in our very human reality. I am not speaking here of physical imagery.

I know that Sikhi's interpretations of the Creator reject such limited formulations that transform the Creator into a micromanager of his creation and maintaining a tedious compendium of the failings of the least of us - ours sins contemplated or committed. Sikhi emphatically rejects such formulations of the Creator but even Sikhs, much like believers of other major faiths, fall into the trap. I have dealt with such matters at fuller length elsewhere.

Many of our interpretational troubles begin from a literal rendering of religious scriptures. Don't forget that most major religions of mankind are centuries old; their preaching are couched in mythology, culture and language of the times that are not easily intelligible today. These features frame and carry the message forward which is often chockfull of allegories analogies and metaphors. Hence the misinterpretations in understanding.

When exploring religious history and teaching my view would be to look very closely for consistency of the message and how it shapes our lives today but to not obsess and kvetch about objective evidence-based history in its narrative.

As an example: For much of the chapter on Genesis in the Bible to make literal sense would require that we suspend human intelligence, results of science and the scientific method pretty much entirely. But don't forget that doing so would be a waste of human intellect that itself is a God-given gift.

Hence the false but widely accepted popular notion that religions and faith are subjective matters that lack objectivity and science is the only objective reality. Of course, there are religious movements that embrace the exactly opposite idea. I would ask that we discard the idea that science and religions are in inevitable and everlasting conflict that can never be resolved.

I reject both positions in toto.

Keep in mind that the ultimate reality transcends both our senses and intellect. This means that the ultimate reality cannot ever be objectively measured, categorized or captured with even the best tools of humankind. This posits the truth that there is a considerable degree of feeling and subjectivity that lies beyond the conscious reality of our existence.

This truth hit me hard in 1994 when I was struggling to come up with a name for my first book of essays on Sikhs and Sikhi in the diaspora. Finally I dubbed it SIKHS & SIKHISM: A View with a Bias. And sure enough some Sikhs took umbrage. Was I biased against Sikhism they demanded to know?

I tried to explain that one doesn't sit down to write pages upon pages about something if it does not have a claim on one's feelings. In life there is nothing without some degree of bias either for or against the cause to which one dedicates time, sweat and tears. I think I by the time my last book came out a year ago I had laid the controversy to rest in my mind; I titled the book, SIKHS TODAY: Ideas & Opinions. Certainly, with the subtitle "Ideas & Opinions" I had discarded any pretence of unadulterated objectivity.

My position was and is that pure objectivity doesn't really exist and we operate in a world of different degrees of subjectivity. And that principle operates whether we are talking about religion or the most esoteric science. In the world of religion people would willingly accept my proposition; in the matter of sciences they would likely cavil.

But look at science, the premier cerebral achievement of humanity.

A significant and convincing body of critical literature shows that there really isn't much human activity that is entirely and provably free of bias. Psychological research shows that experimental animals, including humans as well as sub-humans, seem to mimic responses that the observer expects. All kinds of medications - placebos --appear to elicit expected responses to a measurable degree that frame patients' expected response. The bias is there; its degree is variable and not always predictable. "Observer-bias" is a widespread and recognized anomaly in the pursuit of science.

My friends, Ravinder Singh and Manjyot Kaur kindly filled in some gaps for me. Thomas Kuhn speaks eloquently of bias in science and labels it the scientific paradigm. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, similarly contends that science assumes nature to have been fully understood by science in dogmas grounded in philosophic materialism - and that's the bias of science.

The Hawthorne effect, now established dogma in research, demonstrates that when human workers are being tested and observed it alters their performance. Such Observer-Expectancy linkage surely biases observations and conclusions.

This tells me that the best science, biological or otherwise, is not entirely free of bias. In other words, much as we try, even the most objectively run research projects may not be entirely free of some subjectivity and never devoid of some observer bias.

Also, as I have argued elsewhere at great length, science and technology, for instance, tell us how to harness nuclear energy and build an atom bomb but science doesn't tell us why we should build one or to what purpose we should put the product. That is the domain of religion and ethics, not of science.

Ergo, I have argued that there is no conflict between science and religion and the two are entirely complementary - two wonderfully different facets of a larger reality.

So, I have to thank Chairperson Reshma at my talk who dug out of my hoary past a relic that's now like a new toy altogether. I also acknowledge her research skills.

A venerable publication, Journal of Irreproducible Results started in 1955, is now in its 49th year of spoofing science and pseudoscience. In my younger days when I was engaged in serious science I, too, have published in it.

SLOBS created in my youth in collusion with others of similar bent fascinates me afresh. Today I celebrate a bias rediscovered.