A New Economy?

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife and the promotion of Christian fundamentalism.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2010 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority.

The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. The old economy consists of many patterns of thought, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive thoughts that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic patterns of thought: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of ideas; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic ideas, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the companies and individuals that are ready to pursue sustainability memes. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge.

It is not just conservative politicians, but also the dominant religion, that prevent the necessary changes in our economy. Conservative Christianity tells people that God wants them to have luxuries, no matter how many poor people may suffer from our pursuit of luxuries. The churches support the current economy, because they depend on contributions from happy parishioners. And they support the politicians who resist change. The last thing that conservative churches want to see is a country where millions of people have the sort of consumer ethics that Jesus of Nazareth had.

Another thing that I believe conservative churches fear about the coming economic transition is that it will require people to think for themselves. The churches want people to simply believe what they are told, by preachers or by corporations. Once people start realizing that they can change the world, no telling where it might end up: people might realize that they have been duped not just by corporations but by churches as well.

Biblical Ignorance from Two Directions

Most religious conservatives are ignorant of the Bible. Anyone who can think that everything in the Bible can be taken literally must not know very much about it. Literalism can only be held as a vague belief by people who are unfamiliar with the details of scripture. Now, the preachers and God-appointed political leaders who tell everybody what the Bible says must actually study it, and know that what I am saying is true. But the average fundamentalist in church does not read the Bible very much. They may read the passages that their preachers tell them to read—especially the book of Revelation—but they certainly do not read the passages about social justice or taking care of the land or, especially, the agnostic passages in the book of Ecclesiastes. In my evolution class, when covering the friction between evolutionary science and religion, I mention that one of the big problems is why a good God would use heartless natural selection as his method of creating. And I point out that this is not a new problem; the book of Ecclesiastes addressed this problem thousands of years ago. (See early 2010 entries in this blog.) I read to them from the book of Ecclesiastes, and none of the students in my class recognized it. One of the class creationists asked for an exact reference so she could (to her credit) look it up, and I just said to read the whole thing. I suspect there are many things in the Bible that fundamentalist preachers do not want people to actually read. If they made a movie out of the book of Joshua it would be rated R for violence and explicit sex, sometimes in the same scene. Fundamentalists suffer from Biblical ignorance. They should read the Bible. They would find to their astonishment that the Bible does not say that Obama is the antichrist, and that it presents a social model that is closer to socialism than it is to free market capitalism.

Of course, there is also a lot of Biblical ignorance among the agnostics and atheists. This is regrettable for several reasons. One is that lazy agnostics and atheists (unlike thoughtful ones) have no idea what they are rejecting or why, and they can make themselves look stupid if they criticize religious people. But the other is that the Bible is a rich source of some of the greatest literature, in which some of the most important questions of the human spirit are investigated. The stories! The Iliad and Odyssey are excellent both in the quality of stories and the way they address eternal issues of the mind and spirit, but the Bible has them beat, easily. There are hundreds of millions of people in secular western culture who have no idea that Jesus saved a woman from being stoned by saying, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” They have to reinvent the idea for themselves as if the world just now began, with their generation. This is just one example. The people of the past were not just a monolithic pile of dirty violent morons. They struggled with the same important questions that we struggle with, and the Bible is a record of some of the most glorious struggles and beautiful insights.

If I were dictator, I would have everyone in our western society learn about the Bible, without insisting that they assume any particular theology. This would immediately raise the level of mental experience in both fundamentalists and the non-religious people.

A Statement of Respect

This morning, my colleague from graduate school, Art Zangerl, died after a long battle with cancer. I posted a scientific statement of respect for Art on my evolution blog. In it I mentioned that Art personified what it means to be a dedicated scientist. He had a zeal for using science to understand not just his own area of study (coevolution of insects and herbivores) but the whole human experience of the world.

Art’s wife posted his final message online right after his passing. One of the things that he regretted seeing in our society today was the large number of people who attack science general and evolution in particular in the name of religion. He wrote, “Evolution is like a magic key. Once you understand it, really understand it, so much becomes clear.” He said that evolution helps us understand the darker side of human nature, but also what he called the social side, such as altruism. Although evolution has made us a species capable of hatred, we are also a species that can fight against hatred and oppression. Art particularly admired the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Art also expressed some of his feelings about science and religion. He was not afraid to face death. He wrote, “Please do not mourn me.” And he was dissatisfied with the type of religion, such as the Catholicism in which he was raised, that required beliefs without proof. All humans have beliefs; but science requires you to give up beliefs if it fails to match the evidence. “That’s not easy, even for scientists.” But science as a way of understanding the world has proven, he said, phenomenally successful.

This is the same day that Christopher Hitchens died. But I never heard Art lash out against people who hold religious beliefs, in the way that Hitchens was famous for doing. Art was more interested in intellectual honesty than in attacking religion. I ally myself with Art Zangerl rather than Christopher Hitchens.

I hope that I can leave behind as good a legacy of honest intellectual inquiry and genuine human warmth as Art Zangerl.

Conservatives are Missing the Point, part one

I have begun reading a book by Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern. Kern is infamous not just in Oklahoma but around the nation for certain inflammatory remarks she has made regarding gays, as well as her attacks on evolutionary science. So I decided to read what she has said about herself in her book, The Stoning of Sally Kern.

What was it that she said that has become so infamous? In a speech, which was secretly taped, she compared gays to a cancer, and implied that they were worse than terrorists. Gays will cause America to collapse: this is her clear message.

I would like to make four points, in this and upcoming essays, about what Sally Kern said in her speech and in her book.

First, she seemed genuinely surprised that she received so much hate mail and public notoriety for her statements. She received thousands of emails, many of them filled with unprintable invectives. Protests against her public appearances have been vitriolic. Her opponents have treated her with extreme disrespect, and have passed on some false information about her. For example, they said that her son had been arrested for homosexual activities, and that she was therefore a hypocrite. But, as it turns out, the man who was arrested had the same first and last names, but not the same middle name, as her son. I am not aware that Kern’s critics have retracted or apologized. She repeatedly describes herself as a cookie-baking grandmother who loves everybody, including gays—she really wants God to heal them of their evil.

But, of course, she should not have been surprised at the response. Gays believe themselves to have been born gay. Therefore to criticize their sexual orientation is to criticize their very biological identity.

Gays respond to such criticism the way minorities respond to racism: with a deep visceral anger. I have only the slightest experience with this. A woman in our neighborhood has repeatedly displayed evidence of racism against Native Americans. As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I felt deeply offended and became angry far past the bounds of logic and reason. And yet I am only part Cherokee. How might fullbloods have felt? One of my former neighbors, a young Native woman, cried as she told me about the woman’s racist remarks, almost a year after they had been made. When you condemn someone for who they are, rather than for something they have chosen to do, they will react violently. In a similar way, gays responded to Kern’s message with their guts, which is where she kicked them, rather than with their heads. It’s not right, but it’s very human and only to be expected.

Second, Kern presents her brand of Biblical conservatism as the only alternative to amorality. She defends her position by explaining how America, like any society, has to have some concept of right and wrong. This is true, of course; but her brand of morality is not the only possible ethical standard upon which a nation can be built. She uses the same faulty reasoning that the creationists use: you have to believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and believe in the Flood of Noah, or else you are an atheist. Not surprisingly, Kern is a creationist who is as infamous for her creationist legislation as for her attacks on gays.

Third, Kern focuses her attention on a relatively minor issue and ignores the big ones. There is no evidence that homosexuality has ever caused a nation to collapse. But there is evidence that nations have collapsed as a result of environmental catastrophes. Kern appears to be opposed to any policies that would encourage environmental stewardship, choosing instead to embrace the so-called free market. The Old Testament clearly links the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah to their failure to take care of the land (see next essay), rather than to gays and lesbians.

Fourth, Kern also totally ignores the problem of poverty, as a legislator. She works in a food kitchen for the poor but defends the economic system that keeps them enslaved in poverty. The Old Testament prophets, especially Isaiah (see later essay), clearly link the problems of Israel and Judah to their oppression of the poor, never once saying that gays and lesbians caused God to punish them.

Politics and Religion again

At the moment I am writing numerous other things, which at the moment are not connected with this blog. But I hope to write more things for this blog very soon. I just want to reassure you that this blog is not dead. If you have not checked on the archives, particularly some of the earliest posts, please do so. An agnostic is not someone who carelessly decides to not bother thinking about what, if anything, God might be, but one who is always asking new questions and looking for new ways of thinking about what God might be.

But I have noticed that in the tumultuous landscape of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are the leading contenders. Both are bedeviled with sexual scandals--those of Cain alleged, those of Gingrich confirmed. The Republicans still consider themselves the defenders of Christian family values. But it is Barack Obama, and his family, that actually live in a Christian manner. Christianity is not something you say but something you do.

Darwin Celebrates Halloween

Last Monday was Halloween (or, in the traditional spelling, Hallowe’en, or Hallowed Evening). I taught my evolution class that morning. I wore a T-shirt with a skull on it, with the word “Evolution” over it. Evolution is the name of a little store in the Soho section of New York City which sells items that are vaguely connected with evolution (e.g., tarantulas in plastic).

I then put on a zombie mask and screamed out to the class, “Brains! Brains! BRAINS! BRAINS! I’m Charles Darwin and I’m going to eat your brains and your children’s brains and turn you all into atheists!”

I then removed the mask and explained that Darwin was not a zombie, and that I had no intention of turning anybody into an atheist. I said something like this. “Now, if your religion requires you to believe things that are scientifically disprovable, then I will have to tell you that you are mistaken. But science cannot tell you whether or not there is a purpose behind the universe, or even if there are other universes, or whether this purpose is a personal God. Many scientists believe in God, without any contradiction with their roles as scientists.”

Then I told them about Darwin’s American friend, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who was the chief defender of Darwinian evolution in America, but who was as traditional and orthodox a Christian as you could hope to find. A Sunday school teacher, no less. Darwin explained in a letter to Gray how much he regretted that he could not agree with Gray on a religious view. Darwin wrote to Gray, “With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.”

I then told them about the correspondence I have been maintaining with a prisoner in California. He first wrote to me a couple of years ago when he read my review of an evolution book. He must already have been pursuing an understanding of evolution, because he got my name from a book review I wrote for the National Center for Science Education Reports. He has written to me with many questions, and I have sent answers back to him. I have also sent him paper printouts of things I have written (hardcover books are not allowed in prison mail delivery).

At one point, the prisoner wrote to me about becoming an atheist and the freedom of thought that this allowed him to have. I wrote back to him recently, explaining that atheism was not necessary in order to accept science in general or evolution in particular, and that many scientists are religious. I do not want to lead anyone to atheism. In this way, I am doing exactly what Darwin did. I have not yet received a reply from the prisoner.

I used Halloween as a humorous opportunity to bring up a discussion of this important topic.

Don't miss my YouTube video about this!

What Galileo Saw

Last night (October 29), Jupiter was in opposition to the Earth, which means that it is exactly opposite the sun, and that it is as close as it is going to be this year. I do not know if it is the closest that it has ever been to the Earth, but it is close enough that even an inexpensive telescope will allow you to see its banded clouds. I have not yet seen the red spot, however. Jupiter is easily the brightest object in the sky after sunset. It rises about 8:30 local time.

The most amazing thing about looking at Jupiter is that you can see its moons. If you look at it on successive nights, you will see that the moons move quite rapidly—not rapidly enough to see, but enough that they are in strikingly different conformations each night. It was not just the moons, but the movement of the moons, that Galileo observed, and which led him to understand that Jupiter was a planet with its own moons. Jupiter was not just a bright light on a sphere that turned around the Earth. When Galileo made these observations, the medieval view of the cosmos fell apart, and those whose power depended on the medieval mindset (the Church) reacted with ferocity. The outcome of the Church’s attack on Galileo is well known.

You can get out a telescope and observe the very thing that got Galileo in trouble and changed the human view of the cosmos.

Christianity’s Long Tradition of Hating Science

I highly recommend the movie Agora, which depicts the life and death of the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in Alexandria, about 400 CE. An agora is a marketplace, in this place the marketplace of ideas in ancient Alexandria where Egyptian paganism, early Christianity, and early science were all in public view. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the Christians of Alexandria seized power and suppressed the marketplace of ideas, replacing it with religious dictatorship. This was the main theme of the movie: both the leader of a Christian terrorist organization, and Cyril, who is today esteemed as a great figure in church history, used violence to suppress scientific inquiry. In particular, Cyril used a passage from the writings of Paul (which, it turns out, was inserted into Paul’s writing by a later religious leader) to condemn Hypatia for being a woman who dared to teach men. You cannot watch this movie without coming away with a dark understanding that the early Christian church, far from being a community of love that welcomed the downtrodden of the world into its embrace, was little different from a terrorist organization, and hated scientific inquiry. The Christian terrorist leader gave bread to the poor with the conscious purpose of recruiting them as rioters to take over the city of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, at the end, the Christians strip Hypatia, stone her, mutilate her, and drag her through the streets of Alexandria for the glory of God and Jesus Christ.

Of course, we all know that many Christian thinkers have embraced scientific inquiry. But the historical facts, as dramatized in this movie, show that this is not how the Christian church got started. It got started as a way of violently repressing all freedom of thought. Christian philosophers and scientists came later, and always represented a minority within Christianity. To this day, among conservative Christians, there are far more people who merely want to use religion as a way of controlling the minds of others, and of grabbing political power, than people who truly want to understand the universe from a Christian viewpoint. Back when I was a Christian intellectual, a member of the American Scientific Affiliation and a professor at Christian colleges, it was clear to me that Christian intellectuals were as out of place in most conservative churches as were non-Christian intellectuals. Christian scientific inquiry exists, but is almost invisible against the flames of conservative Christian suppression of science. The pursuit of knowledge was, and is, an artificial and withering graft onto the corpus of conservative Christianity.

A secondary theme in the movie was the utter joy that Hypatia experienced when she finally understood how the planets revolved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. This joy was in her heart as she walked out into the street to offer herself as a sacrifice to the Christian terrorists. We do not know if the historical Hypatia figured out the discoveries usually attributed to Kepler, over a millennium later, but she might have: her works have all been destroyed, perhaps by Christians of fifth-century Alexandria who insisted that a flat, unmoving Earth was the only belief that should be permitted.

The dark repressive attitude of the Christian church, even in its earliest centuries, contrasts starkly with the brilliant embrace of wisdom that Jesus had. Within a century of Jesus’ death, his church had turned into a political force that would gladly have impaled its own founder on a stake for daring to preach love and forgiveness and for going out onto the hillsides to try to learn about the world through observation.

Even today, most churches are merely mechanisms for extracting money from and exercising control over the minds of people who are looking for love. Not all churches are like this, and there are individual exceptions within most churches. But as an expression of human thought and a conduit of love and altruism, religion has little to recommend it. If you want to learn the truth about the world and how to live, study science, and read the words of Jesus, but don’t bother with any Christianity that came after Jesus.

The Evolution of Religion, part two

The following is a continuation of the entry, “religion, evolution of,” from the Revised Edition of my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012.

Memes: The Software of Religion

The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. The above experiences, such as a sense of disembodiment, will create a compulsion to explain them, an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and the result is a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.

Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by altered mental states, induced by natural compounds (such as psilocybin in some mushrooms), sensory deprivation (as in a cave), ritual rhythmicity, or particularly vivid dreams. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made humans eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. Humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences, and religious memes satisfied this desire.

One of the most important religion memes is guilt. Throughout human prehistory and history, religious leaders have parasitized the human capacity for guilt to reinforce their power over the minds of their followers, and religion has been one of the principal means by which they have done so.

The Evolutionary Advantages of Religion

Religion would probably have been a local aberration in early human populations had it not provided some evolutionary advantage. In modern tribal societies, shamans who claim to have exceptional religious experiences have considerable social power, which can translate into greater resources and reproductive opportunities; no doubt this was also the case during the prehistory of Homo sapiens. David Lewis-Williams points out that this would be the same in the Lascaux cave as in modern charismatic Christianity. Religious leaders would gain the within-population fitness advantage that is necessary for natural selection. Once the trait was established or at least common within a tribe, this tribe would have advantages over tribes that did not possess it—for example, social cohesion and identity that allowed them to prevail in conflicts. Clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would experience a cascade of benefits.

Another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated is the instinct of biophilia. Humans have a natural passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping and roaring inhabitants. To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them. Biophilia, and religious expressions of it, is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in, and has probably helped numerous individuals and tribes to persist through unspeakable hardships.
Although all Homo sapiens groups have religion, there was a striking development of religion when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and later when the most recent ice age forced Northern European tribes southward where they encountered disturbingly intelligent people that already lived in Southern Europe. Religion then functioned in tribal identity. Evidence for the tribal identity function is that there were geographical differences in types and styles of artwork—for example, different caves specialized on different animals, reflecting differences in established traditions.

There have been many different attempted explanations of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Some anthropologists say that the paintings were sympathetic magic to promote successful hunting. However, as David Lewis-Williams points out, the set of animals in the paintings is not the same as the animals that the people ate (for example, they did not eat bears and lions), and only 15 percent of the paintings show animals with spears. The paintings resemble animal visions that people might have seen during hallucinations. The animal paintings are often accompanied by geometric symbols that resemble the images seen during migraines. The animal images are not in their natural habitats, and appear to be floating, and sometimes lack hooves.
To the Cro-Magnon, as to many recent tribal peoples, the wall of a cave may have represented an interface between the outer world and the underworld. When the prehistoric people entered a cave, they were literally entering the underworld. In the darkness they would hallucinate from sensory deprivation, and possibly also from the high levels of carbon dioxide. Then when the lamps were lit, they would paint the images they had seen. Sometimes the artists would also paint their hands, leaving either positive or negative images of them, as a mark of direct contact with the underworld. Hand contact with the wall, and the process of spit-painting, were part of the overall religious experience. The visionary quality of the paintings is particularly evident in the deepest recesses of the caves, some as much as a kilometer underground, where quick sketches of many animals overlapped.

In addition to the individual religious experience, there was also a communal aspect. Religious shamans could gain admiration from their followers by taking them deep into the caves to see the evidence of their religious experiences. Meanwhile, the shallower reaches of the cave served as the assembly rooms for the general population, and it is in such places that the large, vivid images are found. The cave paintings may therefore have served to increase the social status and the fitness of religious leaders.

With the advent of civilization, religion was usually dominated by priests and kings and used as a way of controlling people. The power structure that provided an advantage of some people over others in a society could also allow one city-state to dominate another. This role of religion continues to this day. At the same time, there has been a parallel lineage of prophets who criticize social norms. In ancient Israel, for example, practically all the prophets were outcasts who lived in huts and caves and were sorely hated by the priests and kings. Governments still use religion as a tool of domination in some countries. In the United States, there are many large religious organizations that obtain a great deal of monetary and other kinds of support from their adherents, and these organizations have great influence on national and local politics. Religion is at least as much a tool of power and fitness opportunities as it was at the time of the Cro-Magnons.

Even though religion is not a single adaptation, its memes are closely enough tied together that they will probably all be with the human species as long as it exists. With a rush of Enlightenment optimism, Thomas Jefferson said in the early 19th century, “There is no young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian.” Evidently he was wrong.

Evolution of religion, part one.

The following entries are from the Revised Edition of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012. I have taken them from the entry, “religion, evolution of.”

Homo sapiens is a religious species. This is one of the few behavioral universals of the human species. Though there is individual variation in the strength of this trait, no society is without it; those that tried to eliminate it have failed. Religion appears to be ineradicable. There is clearly no biological basis for particular religions, but it is likely that there is a biological basis for the capacity for religion.

Neandertals apparently did not have religion. The contrast between the religious artifacts of Homo sapiens and their absence in Homo neanderthalensis in their regions of overlap could hardly be greater. While Homo sapiens had intricate burials (a burial of two children in Sungir, Russia, contained 10,000 shell beads each of which took from one to three person hours to prepare), Neandertals apparently dug the shallowest possible graves to keep the body from stinking. The Shanidar burial of a Neandertal with flowers, even if it is confirmed, is a rare and isolated instance. Neandertal pendants associated with the Châtelperronian culture have been mostly dismissed as imitative of the Aurignacian culture of the Cro-Magnon, and even if they were not, their connection with religion is unclear. Neandertal caves totally lack the wall art that abundantly and resplendently represents Cro-Magnon religious experience. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams calls Neandertals “congenital atheists.” Yet Neandertals had brains at least as large as those of modern humans. Other groups of H. sapiens, all over the world, had a similar abundance of religious practice.

What is Religion?

Religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. Many scientists have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. Therefore when scientists say that religion is universal among humans, they mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. They cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. Social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others.

The Brain: The Hardware of Religion

Human brains increased in size over evolutionary time for numerous reasons, including the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it the evolution of intelligence. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size, including the parts associated with the following capacities:

• Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can create a feeling of transcendence (ex- means out of, stasis means place).
• Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. The sensation of having a defined body is something that the brain creates. Some kinds of strokes cause their victims to experience reality as a stream of sensations, without an awareness of embodiment. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.
• Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, and one for which religion clearly provides an outlet. One of the principal components of altruism is guilt, which reinforces the likelihood that people will act altruistically.
• The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this may be a vestige of a child’s worship of parents.
• Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that he or she will die, and the possibility that he or she will be preoccupied by it.
• Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them.

Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. Specific areas and functions of the brain have been implicated in the mystical, religious experience. Neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have been particularly active in researching the brain activities associated with religion. They point out, for example, that when humans enter an altered state of consciousness, the orientation association area of the brain (which in the left lobe is associated with the sensation of having a limited body, and in the right lobe with the sense of space that a person occupies) contribute to out-of-body experiences.

Religion is not pathological, but brain pathologies can help scientists to understand its neurological basis. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe by electrodes (or pathological stimulation by epilepsy) produces experiences closely paralleling the near-death experience of passing through a tunnel towards the light. Similar effects are also produced by the drug ketamine.

Announcement: On my other blog I begin an October series about the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. On my YouTube channel, Darwin visits these dinosaur footprints.

Agnosticism, then what?

I’ve pretty much determined that agnosticism is the only reasonable conclusion I can make to the big questions of life. And yet, there are many times in our lives when we cannot not decide. We have to make at least a provisional decision.

The first is, how do you live, given the uncertainty?

The second is, what do you believe when you die?

For me, the answer to both is based in Jesus of Nazareth. The man, not the icon of doctrine that churches have created about him. I will live in such a manner in which I pursue, however imperfectly, those things that Jesus considered to be important: love of God (however vaguely I understand God) and love of humankind. Jesus also loved the Earth, upon which all humans (the poorest most directly) depend. And, at the moment of death, I will still not know whether there is something that will come afterward, or if Jesus is actually alive in some way, but if there is anyone in that afterlife, I believe it will be Jesus.

The uncertainty of my statements will not satisfy fundamentalists or even mainstream Christians. Certainly fundamentalists will call down the seals, trumpets, and plagues of Revelation upon my head. But if Jesus still exists and is waiting for us, I believe he will be happy with my sentiments. Not the Jesus on a white horse in Revelation trampling the grapes of wrath and beating the nations into a sorry pulp, but the Jesus who wandered on the hillsides of Judaea.

On John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies

I recently read John Updike’s 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. The late John Updike was one of the most empathetic writers who ever lived, at least as empathetic as Anton Chekhov. In this novel, Updike traces four generations of the Wilmot family: from a minister to a mail carrier to an actress to a religious cult member. Updike got inside the minds of these fictitious people, just the way he got inside the mind of a fictitious young Muslim in his novel Terrorist. What a diversity of people Updike could understand, and explain to us! In the Beauty of the Lilies was obviously inspired by the Branch Davidian event of 1993 just as Terrorist was inspired by the September 11 attacks.

Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:

The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.

I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.

A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”

So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”

Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.

I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.

The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.

Christianity and the Environment, part 3

We considered, in two preceding blog entries, how conservative Christianity has defined the nonhuman world as creation and therefore as something expendable by humans. Other religious traditions consider the Earth to be nature, from which humans evolved and of which humans are a part, just like every other species. Some of these religions are polytheistic, such as Buddhism and paganism, while others are more akin to spiritual philosophies, such as Taoism. There is even a little of this viewpoint in the Bible. The 104th psalm describes a world of creatures, of which humans are depicted as merely one component. Although these religions have not led their adherents on a deliberate conquest of the Earth, the homelands of these religions have suffered their share of environmental problems. The natives of North and South America experienced collapsed civilizations just like the Europeans.

The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.

Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.

Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.

The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

Religion and Connection

Yesterday, September 8, was Antonín Dvořák’s birthday (1841). I celebrated it briefly by listening to two of my favorite pieces by this composer: the American Suite, and Wodník (usually called the Water Goblin). For me, this was an intense religious experience. The word religion comes from the Latin ligere, which means to connect. I felt connected not just to the beauty that flooded the composer’s mind as he wrote this music, even though he died over 50 years before I was born, but also the connection that he felt with the entire world of beauty.

This is an example of the connectedness of which religion, at its best, consists. There were no words, just music. But the music also told stories: I could just see the nineteenth-century American countryside in the American Suite, including the last movement that sounded like a wild dance of Native Americans; and the musical themes of the goblin and the young woman created images in my mind. Stories with words also create a feeling of connectedness: fictitious characters can provide a connection between you and thousands of people whom you will never meet. I felt this connection later in the evening when I read part of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, one of his most empathetic novels.

What these experiences did not have was doctrine. These experiences carried with them no assertions to which I had to give assent.

Religious leaders enhance their own power (and often their own wealth) by insisting that you have to give assent to the doctrines that they purvey to you. You can’t just go out in the woods, or read the Bible stories for yourself. You have to receive salvation through their preaching. They ride the wild horse of religious feelings, whoop and whirl their hats, and proclaim that they and their doctrines are the source of the feelings; and then they lasso you into their domination. Then they say that those religious experiences do not exist outside of the little kingdom of their preaching.

Christianity and the Environment, Part 2

Even though many evangelical Christians criticized the 1967 paper by Lynn White, Jr. (see previous blog entry), he was right in his conclusion that conservative Christianity has encouraged a brutal conquest of nature. One reason is that the Bible is not a book. It is a collection of books, written by many people over many centuries, and it does not have a single coherent message. Most of the biblical books are themselves the product of editorial redaction from different primordial traditions. The first chapter of Genesis, correctly interpreted by White, presents a different view of creation from the second chapter, which was originally written by a different person. Each part of the Bible potentially contradicts every other part. An adherent of Christianity may choose to accept a Biblical image of conquering the Earth, or a Biblical image of taking care of it. It all depends on which passage is chosen. Adherents of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam can, however, force these passages into harmony, and in this way they can use the second chapter of Genesis to ameliorate the first.

White was right for another reason. Christian theologians have forced all the Biblical passages into harmony, and the climax of this harmonized Bible is the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is the only example of an entire style of literature, popular in the Mediterranean world about 100 C.E., which is familiar to most modern readers. In this book, the entire biosphere of the Earth is destroyed during cosmic battles between good and evil, and those who are saved live in Heaven. The Heavenly City there described is the antithesis of biodiversity, and contains virtually nothing of the original creation. There is a river and a single tree. Everything else is gold and jewels—an utterly artificial environment. If this is, as about half of Americans believe, the future of the universe, what is the point of saving species and ecosystems? (See earlier blog entries for more on this idea.) For this reason also, if Christians are to participate in the rescue of the environment, they must look beyond the Bible and perhaps, as White suggests, emulate St. Francis.

The extreme popularity of apocalyptic Christianity meant that Christians, as a whole, were a feeble source of support for environmental protection. Their main passion was to support the politically conservative George W. Bush Administration, which rejected the evidence of global warming and paid little attention to environmental protection. In fact, after the end of the Bush administration, the full extent of conservative neglect for even the most basic environmental protection became obvious. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior was supposed to license fossil fuel extraction on federal lands with due consideration of the impact that this extraction would have on natural habitats. Instead, they gave licenses to corporations in return for bribes and sexual favors. When President Bush left the 2007 economic summit, he said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” making environmental ethics into what he considered to be a joke.

Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world’s leading defender of biodiversity, wrote a book that was addressed to an unnamed Baptist minister. Wilson said that a conservative Christian could find common ground with even a secular humanist like himself by defending the Earth, which Wilson called the Creation. Wilson, however, wrote this book only after originally considering the Christian environmental movement to be a hopeless cause.

With the end of the Bush Administration and the disgrace of several leading Christian anti-environmentalists, a tide of opinion has turned towards Christian environmentalism. Despite this, many conservative Christians still consider the Earth to be unworthy of serious attention. They focus their attention instead on fighting against evolutionary science. When Edward O. Wilson visited Oklahoma in March 2009, a group of creationists disputed him about whether Charles Darwin did or did not believe in a Creator, and in the process Wilson’s impassioned plea for saving the Earth’s biodiversity was largely obscured. The view of the Earth that many conservative Christians have can be summarized in this way: “It’s okay to spit on it, to drive a truck over it, to spill oil on it, to chop it down, or to shoot it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved!”

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

Christianity and the Environment, Part 1

Christian responses to the environment can be roughly classified on the basis of what a person considers the environment to be: creation, or nature. The first considers the environment and all of its living and nonliving components to be the product of a deity that has made humankind separate from it in some way, while the second considers the environment to be the source of humankind (“nature” comes from the Latin for “birth”). First, in this installment, let us consider the approach that considers the environment to be creation.

The major monotheistic religions of the world (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that a single, all-powerful deity created the world and made humans the rulers of it. Moreover, these religions base their beliefs upon scriptures written long before people even imagined the questions of environmental ethics. Until the last few centuries, humans quite rightly viewed the Earth as unconquerable and usually dangerous. The Earth could take care of itself. Modern adherents of these religions therefore turn to their pre-ecological scriptures and pick out passages that were not written for the purpose of answering such questions and try to base systems of environmental ethics upon them, concluding that the environment is expendable.

Because of the importance of the Judeo-Christian Bible in the history of western culture, historian Lynn White, Jr. wrote in 1967 that Christianity, guided by the first chapter of Genesis, had been in the forefront of a largely successful attempt to conquer the created world. It is beyond dispute that, according to this chapter, God gives humans the command to conquer and subdue the Earth and have dominion over it. The words clearly refer to the kind of conquest that kings exercised over vanquished nations. White did not, however, say that Christianity should be rejected, but that Christians should use Saint Francis of Assisi, a medieval Italian monk who considered the Sun, Moon, wind, fire, and all creatures to be his brothers and sisters, as the model of ethical behavior rather than the Bible.

Not surprisingly, many Christians became defensive and claimed that White had misinterpreted the first chapter of Genesis. Since 1967, Christian writers have found many passages in the Bible that paint a very different picture of the creation. Here are a few examples:

• The second chapter of Genesis depicts God as commanding humans to take care of the Earth the way one would care for a garden (the Garden of Eden).
• The third chapter of Genesis depicts expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and a host of environmental problems (“cursed is the ground…thorns and thistles it shall bring forth”) as consequences of sin.
• The sixth chapter of Genesis describes Noah, whose family was to be the sole survivors of a worldwide flood. God old Noah to build an ark big enough for a pair of each species of terrestrial animal, presumably even those that Noah did not especially care about.
• The Ten Commandments included a prohibition against work on one day of the week, called the sabbath. The result of this commandment, according to conservative Jewish scholars, is the deliberate interruption of the momentum of acquisition—to desist, once a week, from using other people (and the Earth) as a source of profit.
• The Old Testament law included some commandments that dealt directly with the Earth. Most famous is the Sabbath of the Fields, in which agricultural fields were supposed to be left fallow every seventh year.
• In the book of Job, God addresses Job from a whirlwind, and describes a vast unknowable and unconquerable world of creatures, from large ones such as Behemoth and Leviathan to humble ones such as donkeys and conies. The message is clear that the purposes of these creatures have absolutely nothing to do with humans. The fact that these creatures are untamed was a perfectly acceptable part of God’s order of the world.
• Many passages in the psalms and prophets describe the beauty of creation entirely apart from any benefit it may confer on humans. A passage from the prophet Isaiah describes trees reclaiming wasteland and restoring its water resources, and claims that this process, which would now be called ecological, was the work of God.
• Jesus frequently used symbolism from the creation, from wildflowers to sparrows, in his parables—frequently things that would be noticed only by people who stopped to carefully observe them.

Ecology-minded Christians, who focus attention on these passages, claim that God has given humans the responsibility to be stewards, or caretakers, of the Earth, rather than its conquerors. This is an important concept, even though the terms steward and caretaker do not appear in the Bible in connection with the Earth.

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.