The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. This is the major component of evolved human intelligence. If you have brain experiences mentioned above—a sense of disembodiment; a conviction that everything is caused by an agent; sexual euphoria; and visions of the tunnel—you will also have the compulsion to explain them. Here is 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 you have 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 hallucinogenic drugs, which tapped into the sense of disembodiment. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made us eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. We humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences—what young person has not tried to express the overwhelming sense of being in love?—and religious memes satisfied this desire.
The earliest religions may have been like the theology of Adam and Eve, as depicted in the early chapters of Genesis. They seemed to have no theology except that they knew there was a godlike being who walked around in the garden in the cool of the evening. Deep in the Cro-Magnon caves such as Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet, people seeking religious experiences made lots of marks on the walls, and touched the walls, painting silhouettes of their hands. According to anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, they thought they were making contact with the spirit realm. It may have taken thousands of more years before complex mythologies and systems of theology developed.
This essay is part of my recently published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Religious Hardware of the Human Brain
Human brains increased in size for a number of reasons, such as the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it. 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. Some parts of the brain, even while not themselves conferring advantages, may have gotten dragged along in the general brain size increase. These can be considered to be the mental hardware of religion. Here are some examples.
Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can make you feel that you have transcended out of your place on Earth (ex- means out of, stasis means place). Religions connect religious devotion to sex, for example in the overtly sexual imagery of the Song of Solomon or the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.
Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. Nearly everybody takes the awareness of his or her body for granted. Once in a while, a person experiences a certain kind of stroke in which parts of the left hemisphere are deprived of oxygen and fail to work while the right hemisphere continues to function. Neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor describes a stroke in which she had a feeling that she was not confined to her body, and that she was flowing through a stream of experience. Our brains take nerve impulses from every sensory organ—and these impulses are all the same—and sort them out into sound, color, pain, heat, cold, taste, smell, and orientation. That is, we detect light with our eyes, but we see with our brains; we detect airborne molecules with our noses, but we smell with our brains. Sight and smell are illusions created by the brain. Apparently the sense of being confined within a body is also something that the brain creates. 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, one for which religion clearly provides an outlet.
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 is a neotenous vestige of a child’s worship of parents. People continue to follow their charismatic religious leaders long after the leaders’ hypocrisies are revealed, and break themselves from this bond of devotion only after a great deal of anguish.
Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability to understand that you will die, and the possibility that you 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. The agent of wind or pain is invisible, but the children believe in the agents anyway.
Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. And in addition, there is the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience, which I discussed in a blog entry early last year (January 10, 2010), and which I will address in more detail later this year.
This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books.
Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can make you feel that you have transcended out of your place on Earth (ex- means out of, stasis means place). Religions connect religious devotion to sex, for example in the overtly sexual imagery of the Song of Solomon or the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.
Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. Nearly everybody takes the awareness of his or her body for granted. Once in a while, a person experiences a certain kind of stroke in which parts of the left hemisphere are deprived of oxygen and fail to work while the right hemisphere continues to function. Neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor describes a stroke in which she had a feeling that she was not confined to her body, and that she was flowing through a stream of experience. Our brains take nerve impulses from every sensory organ—and these impulses are all the same—and sort them out into sound, color, pain, heat, cold, taste, smell, and orientation. That is, we detect light with our eyes, but we see with our brains; we detect airborne molecules with our noses, but we smell with our brains. Sight and smell are illusions created by the brain. Apparently the sense of being confined within a body is also something that the brain creates. 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, one for which religion clearly provides an outlet.
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 is a neotenous vestige of a child’s worship of parents. People continue to follow their charismatic religious leaders long after the leaders’ hypocrisies are revealed, and break themselves from this bond of devotion only after a great deal of anguish.
Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability to understand that you will die, and the possibility that you 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. The agent of wind or pain is invisible, but the children believe in the agents anyway.
Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. And in addition, there is the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience, which I discussed in a blog entry early last year (January 10, 2010), and which I will address in more detail later this year.
This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Religion and the Evolved Human Mind
The following essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World (Prometheus Books). I am not sure I agree with everything that I wrote in this passage—my views keep evolving—but I hope you find it interesting anyway.
There is no such thing as religion.
Many writers, as I did in the original edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution, assume that religion is a unified set of evolved behaviors. (I have corrected this mistake in my revised encyclopedia.) It is now clear to me that religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes (pieces of information) 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. We have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. I hereinafter use the term “religion” to refer to this collection of memes.
Therefore when we say that religion is universal among humans, we 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. We 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. And social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others. But we cannot say, as I once said, that religion per se is an ineradicable part of the human mind.
Only humans appear to have religion. Intelligent nonhuman animals appear to live only in the present. They seem unaware that they will die, or take much notice when other members of their species die. The human awareness of death, an awareness we carry with us from adolescence onward, is not necessarily superior to the blessed ignorance of most nonhuman animals.
Exceptions may include elephants, who appear to mourn and to remember the deaths of specific individuals, and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. A vivid example appeared in the November, 2009 National Geographic. The chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon all knew one another. And they all knew an old female, who died in her late forties, which is an advanced age for a chimp. As the human caretakers carried her away on a stretcher, the other chimpanzees lined up along a fence and did things that, to a human observer, appeared to be expressions of grief. Several researchers, including Jane Goodall, have observed chimpanzees appearing to dance as they watched a waterfall, as if they were exulting in its beauty. While even Jane Goodall cannot know what was going on inside of the minds of the chimps, her interpretation—that this was proto-religious awareness on the part of the chimps—is credible.
The main reason that fully-developed religion is unique to humans is that humans have such large brains. The size of the human brain relative to the size of the body, compared to that of other primates, is out of the ball park. Relative brain sizes of primates exceed that of the average mammal, which exceeds that of the average vertebrate. More than any other species, humans seem to have excess brain capacity. One of its outlets is religion.
This would not necessarily be the case in other intelligent species. Science fiction has created a universe full of intelligent but essentially non-religious species. For the inhabitants of Middle Earth, created by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkein, religion is not distinct from everyday life. Intelligence does not require religion, but in our case the increase in brain size over evolutionary time has resulted in the capacity for religion.
There is no such thing as religion.
Many writers, as I did in the original edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution, assume that religion is a unified set of evolved behaviors. (I have corrected this mistake in my revised encyclopedia.) It is now clear to me that religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes (pieces of information) 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. We have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. I hereinafter use the term “religion” to refer to this collection of memes.
Therefore when we say that religion is universal among humans, we 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. We 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. And social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others. But we cannot say, as I once said, that religion per se is an ineradicable part of the human mind.
Only humans appear to have religion. Intelligent nonhuman animals appear to live only in the present. They seem unaware that they will die, or take much notice when other members of their species die. The human awareness of death, an awareness we carry with us from adolescence onward, is not necessarily superior to the blessed ignorance of most nonhuman animals.
Exceptions may include elephants, who appear to mourn and to remember the deaths of specific individuals, and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. A vivid example appeared in the November, 2009 National Geographic. The chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon all knew one another. And they all knew an old female, who died in her late forties, which is an advanced age for a chimp. As the human caretakers carried her away on a stretcher, the other chimpanzees lined up along a fence and did things that, to a human observer, appeared to be expressions of grief. Several researchers, including Jane Goodall, have observed chimpanzees appearing to dance as they watched a waterfall, as if they were exulting in its beauty. While even Jane Goodall cannot know what was going on inside of the minds of the chimps, her interpretation—that this was proto-religious awareness on the part of the chimps—is credible.
The main reason that fully-developed religion is unique to humans is that humans have such large brains. The size of the human brain relative to the size of the body, compared to that of other primates, is out of the ball park. Relative brain sizes of primates exceed that of the average mammal, which exceeds that of the average vertebrate. More than any other species, humans seem to have excess brain capacity. One of its outlets is religion.
This would not necessarily be the case in other intelligent species. Science fiction has created a universe full of intelligent but essentially non-religious species. For the inhabitants of Middle Earth, created by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkein, religion is not distinct from everyday life. Intelligence does not require religion, but in our case the increase in brain size over evolutionary time has resulted in the capacity for religion.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Nature and Language
Nature and Language
Our languages are an indication of our relationship to the world. In many “primitive” languages (such as Navaho), there is a large number of verb tenses, noun declensions, and many other structures that depict complex relationships among the inhabitants of the world, human and nonhuman. In contrast, Modern English has simplified into what is in many ways a means of straightforward technological information. Thousands of gifted writers demonstrate that Modern English can be a very creative medium of expression, and can evoke the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But we have lost something, I believe, in the transition to a complex civilization that sees itself as sitting on top of nature, extracting resources from it, rather than being a part of it.
English speaking people have dominated the spread of industrialism in recent centuries. Frequently, other languages have incorporated English words for new concepts rather than inventing their own. The result can be very striking. One example is Navaho.
I drove through northwestern New Mexico in March 2005, and listened to a Navaho radio station. The broadcaster was reading the news, and used English words for concepts that did not exist in Navaho. Here is the list that I wrote down at the time: “International investment scandal”; “anniversary of invasion of Iraq”; “demonstrators.” The big topic right then was whether the brain-dead woman Terry Schiavo should be disconnected from artificial life support, and it was a cause-celebre of the Republican Party: “feeding tube”; “brain damage”; “House Majority Leader Tom Delay”; “special session.” It occurred to me right then that, if you isolate from English only those things that are the product of modern civilization, what you would get would either be technical terms such as “flash drive” or ugly things such as “international monetary scandal.”
Have we added anything beautiful to our language in recent centuries? Have we added anything that makes our language more expressive of the complexity and beauty of the natural world? Even the new scientific terms about the natural world sound mechanical: “evolutionary isolating mechanisms” and “ecosystems.” (One of my favorites was always a term used by ecosystem modelers who studied carbon cycling: “standing dead compartment,” which referred to the carbon atoms in dead vegetation that had not yet begun to decompose.) Scientists have even substituted “vocalizations” for the “songs” of birds. Science, like any other specialty, needs technical language for its own internal use. But I believe that we should all cultivate the use of beautiful ways of speaking about the natural world—because when we do, we will begin to see more of its complexities.
This essay appeared a couple of years ago on my website.
Our languages are an indication of our relationship to the world. In many “primitive” languages (such as Navaho), there is a large number of verb tenses, noun declensions, and many other structures that depict complex relationships among the inhabitants of the world, human and nonhuman. In contrast, Modern English has simplified into what is in many ways a means of straightforward technological information. Thousands of gifted writers demonstrate that Modern English can be a very creative medium of expression, and can evoke the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But we have lost something, I believe, in the transition to a complex civilization that sees itself as sitting on top of nature, extracting resources from it, rather than being a part of it.
English speaking people have dominated the spread of industrialism in recent centuries. Frequently, other languages have incorporated English words for new concepts rather than inventing their own. The result can be very striking. One example is Navaho.
I drove through northwestern New Mexico in March 2005, and listened to a Navaho radio station. The broadcaster was reading the news, and used English words for concepts that did not exist in Navaho. Here is the list that I wrote down at the time: “International investment scandal”; “anniversary of invasion of Iraq”; “demonstrators.” The big topic right then was whether the brain-dead woman Terry Schiavo should be disconnected from artificial life support, and it was a cause-celebre of the Republican Party: “feeding tube”; “brain damage”; “House Majority Leader Tom Delay”; “special session.” It occurred to me right then that, if you isolate from English only those things that are the product of modern civilization, what you would get would either be technical terms such as “flash drive” or ugly things such as “international monetary scandal.”
Have we added anything beautiful to our language in recent centuries? Have we added anything that makes our language more expressive of the complexity and beauty of the natural world? Even the new scientific terms about the natural world sound mechanical: “evolutionary isolating mechanisms” and “ecosystems.” (One of my favorites was always a term used by ecosystem modelers who studied carbon cycling: “standing dead compartment,” which referred to the carbon atoms in dead vegetation that had not yet begun to decompose.) Scientists have even substituted “vocalizations” for the “songs” of birds. Science, like any other specialty, needs technical language for its own internal use. But I believe that we should all cultivate the use of beautiful ways of speaking about the natural world—because when we do, we will begin to see more of its complexities.
This essay appeared a couple of years ago on my website.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Today in the News
The last essay was about the absence of any kind of discernible God in the things that happen on Earth. Some of the best examples of this are the natural disasters, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the ongoing devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, right now.
A massive, 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami (which is a Japanese word) about thirty feet high which, within minutes, had destroyed entire coastal areas in Japan on Friday, March 11. The news about it in America was rather spotty because we were worried about a wave, maybe a foot high, reaching Hawaii and California. After we were finished worrying about getting our feet wet, we started noticing the devastation in Japan. There were two thousand bodies on the shore just in Miyagi Prefecture. Thousands of people are homeless, many of them outdoors in near freezing conditions with just a blanket. Almost certainly, the death toll would have been as great as that in Indonesia (or as great as the Kanto Earthquake that hit Japan in 1923) were it not for the fact that Japan is the nation most prepared to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis. They were as ready as anybody could be. Which is to say, they were not ready. They are humans facing an overwhelmingly indifferent Earth.
There is no ultimate reason for events like this. It resulted simply from the fact that Japan, which was built by volcanoes, is near a place where one plate of the Earth’s crust slips underneath another one. In this location, perhaps a thousand years of pressure had built up. It was just geology operating in supreme indifference to the presence or absence of humans. It is ludicrous for us to try to figure out why God would permit this. Pat Robertson said that God allowed (caused?) the earthquake in Haiti to punish the people for the practice of voodoo. Robertson arrogantly assumes that he knows the entire mind of God. Blasphemous shithead. But aren’t many other religious people equally blasphemous for speculating that God must have had a reason for it? They think they know the mind of God, and that God must have been superintending the events in Japan these past few days. But maybe there is no reason; maybe it was just geology.
In other news: this is the birthday of President Andrew Jackson, born in 1767. Delusionary patriots consider him to be a beacon of democracy, but Cherokees know different. He used the United States army to forcibly remove the Cherokees from our homeland in what is now Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, defying the United States Supreme Court to do so. This makes him, constitutionally, a military dictator. During the course of the nineteenth century, the United States government broke hundreds of treaties with sovereign Native American nations, but only Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court to do so. The resulting Trail of Tears was not just a tragedy of suffering for the Cherokees; it was a tragedy for the American constitution. Jackson’s face on the $20 bill is the symbol of the American economy to the world; and it is the face of evil. We should get the face of that arrogant bastard off of our currency. Jackson makes Richard Nixon look like a saint.
Tomorrow (March 15) is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre. In 1968, some American soldiers deliberately killed a village of civilians in Vietnam. At least this was widely considered to be a criminal act; the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 was considered to be a legitimate act of the United States government. Maybe we are getting a little bit more ethical; at least we no longer try to kill civilians, in Afghanistan, and the My Lai massacre was unusual (though apparently not unique) during the Vietnam War.
Oh, BTW, have a nice day.
A massive, 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami (which is a Japanese word) about thirty feet high which, within minutes, had destroyed entire coastal areas in Japan on Friday, March 11. The news about it in America was rather spotty because we were worried about a wave, maybe a foot high, reaching Hawaii and California. After we were finished worrying about getting our feet wet, we started noticing the devastation in Japan. There were two thousand bodies on the shore just in Miyagi Prefecture. Thousands of people are homeless, many of them outdoors in near freezing conditions with just a blanket. Almost certainly, the death toll would have been as great as that in Indonesia (or as great as the Kanto Earthquake that hit Japan in 1923) were it not for the fact that Japan is the nation most prepared to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis. They were as ready as anybody could be. Which is to say, they were not ready. They are humans facing an overwhelmingly indifferent Earth.
There is no ultimate reason for events like this. It resulted simply from the fact that Japan, which was built by volcanoes, is near a place where one plate of the Earth’s crust slips underneath another one. In this location, perhaps a thousand years of pressure had built up. It was just geology operating in supreme indifference to the presence or absence of humans. It is ludicrous for us to try to figure out why God would permit this. Pat Robertson said that God allowed (caused?) the earthquake in Haiti to punish the people for the practice of voodoo. Robertson arrogantly assumes that he knows the entire mind of God. Blasphemous shithead. But aren’t many other religious people equally blasphemous for speculating that God must have had a reason for it? They think they know the mind of God, and that God must have been superintending the events in Japan these past few days. But maybe there is no reason; maybe it was just geology.
In other news: this is the birthday of President Andrew Jackson, born in 1767. Delusionary patriots consider him to be a beacon of democracy, but Cherokees know different. He used the United States army to forcibly remove the Cherokees from our homeland in what is now Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, defying the United States Supreme Court to do so. This makes him, constitutionally, a military dictator. During the course of the nineteenth century, the United States government broke hundreds of treaties with sovereign Native American nations, but only Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court to do so. The resulting Trail of Tears was not just a tragedy of suffering for the Cherokees; it was a tragedy for the American constitution. Jackson’s face on the $20 bill is the symbol of the American economy to the world; and it is the face of evil. We should get the face of that arrogant bastard off of our currency. Jackson makes Richard Nixon look like a saint.
Tomorrow (March 15) is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre. In 1968, some American soldiers deliberately killed a village of civilians in Vietnam. At least this was widely considered to be a criminal act; the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 was considered to be a legitimate act of the United States government. Maybe we are getting a little bit more ethical; at least we no longer try to kill civilians, in Afghanistan, and the My Lai massacre was unusual (though apparently not unique) during the Vietnam War.
Oh, BTW, have a nice day.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Fundamental Problem
As a professor and author on the subject of evolution, living in Oklahoma, I sometimes come in contact with creationism. Not as often as you might think—my students seem to either like what I teach or internalize their anger. They do so because I tell them that I used to be a creationist—that I was wrong, but not stupid. And I provide evidence. I used to let them write papers to express their viewpoints, but so many of them plagiarized that I quit doing this. (The only openly creationist paper was one that the student bought from a website for $15.) The biggest problem with creationism in Oklahoma will probably be from the state legislature which, now totally in Republican hands, promises a crop of nationally notorious creationist bills.
In my writings and classes, we deal with a lot of evidences for evolution. But the most important concept in evolution is that Darwin did for biology what Newton did for physics: just as the planets move by natural laws, not because God pushes them (a belief for which Leibniz condemned Newton), so species have originated not because God made them but by natural laws. This is why Darwin said “…this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity…” in the final paragraph of the Origin of Species.
The reason that this is so important is that all the aspects of the world, from the stars and planets to the weather to biological life to the experiences in our human lives, the world runs by natural laws exactly as if there is no God. That is the fundamental problem in the comparison of the scientific and religious views of the world. Evolution is just a scientific admission of what we have always known: the world runs by itself, with no divine presence or influence.
The absence of God, or at least of any miraculous action on God’s part, is most noticeable in the abundance of evil and suffering in the world. If you saw a child dying in utter misery and pain, and you had the opportunity to do just one little thing to rescue that child, would you be able to ignore her cries and walk away? God can. Are you more loving than God? He has been able to stop His ears from hearing the desperate cries of billions of people throughout history, most of them innocent, or else has the self-control to block all loving response. Indeed, the innocent suffer much more than the guilty, if only because there are so many of them. This situation is consistent with godless evolution, but not with an all-powerful and loving God. If there is a God, it is not in this physical universe or in any other with which this universe or its inhabitants can have any contact.
The writer of Ecclesiastes (the book of the Bible that preachers like to pretend is not there) identified this problem 3000 years ago: the absence of God in everything from the endless cycles of the oceans to the injustices of daily life. It is a problem that Judaism has had for 3000 years, Christianity for 2000 years. Where is God? This is not something that began with Darwin.
This essay appeared on my website on March 29, 2009.
In my writings and classes, we deal with a lot of evidences for evolution. But the most important concept in evolution is that Darwin did for biology what Newton did for physics: just as the planets move by natural laws, not because God pushes them (a belief for which Leibniz condemned Newton), so species have originated not because God made them but by natural laws. This is why Darwin said “…this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity…” in the final paragraph of the Origin of Species.
The reason that this is so important is that all the aspects of the world, from the stars and planets to the weather to biological life to the experiences in our human lives, the world runs by natural laws exactly as if there is no God. That is the fundamental problem in the comparison of the scientific and religious views of the world. Evolution is just a scientific admission of what we have always known: the world runs by itself, with no divine presence or influence.
The absence of God, or at least of any miraculous action on God’s part, is most noticeable in the abundance of evil and suffering in the world. If you saw a child dying in utter misery and pain, and you had the opportunity to do just one little thing to rescue that child, would you be able to ignore her cries and walk away? God can. Are you more loving than God? He has been able to stop His ears from hearing the desperate cries of billions of people throughout history, most of them innocent, or else has the self-control to block all loving response. Indeed, the innocent suffer much more than the guilty, if only because there are so many of them. This situation is consistent with godless evolution, but not with an all-powerful and loving God. If there is a God, it is not in this physical universe or in any other with which this universe or its inhabitants can have any contact.
The writer of Ecclesiastes (the book of the Bible that preachers like to pretend is not there) identified this problem 3000 years ago: the absence of God in everything from the endless cycles of the oceans to the injustices of daily life. It is a problem that Judaism has had for 3000 years, Christianity for 2000 years. Where is God? This is not something that began with Darwin.
This essay appeared on my website on March 29, 2009.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Peace Be Unto You
You are free. Almost.
Actually, as a society, we are not free. The Constitution is a technicality, because we are ruled by corporations, who (yes, they insist that they are persons) act as though they have no responsibilities to you at all: you, but not they, are bound by contracts. We are their slaves.
My recent experience with this was an attempt to refinance a mortgage with Bank of America, regarding which I will say little, since you are not reading this to hear me complain. Since I have a perfect payment history, and since it was not a new property, they quickly pre-approved the loan. Then it quickly became what might have been a nightmare. They transferred my loan to a succession of five different people, and at each transition they misplaced paperwork which I dutifully re-sent. And they kept changing the arrangements on which we had agreed. I said this might have been a nightmare, but I had an option that kept it from being so. I have an existing mortgage, and there is nothing actually wrong with it. I could, and did, simply cancel the refinance process. I only wish I had checked online before I had applied for the refinance loan, and seen the prodigious number of consumer complaints about Bank of America. Bank of America is competent at just two things: taking taxpayer bailout money, and compensating their CEO. In fairness I will add that B of A repaid their $45 billion TARP loan.
My solution will work for you too, at least sometimes. Just say no. It is nearly unpatriotic to say this, but the most important thing we can do is to not buy things, whether mortgages or snack foods. Even though we are their slaves when we do business with them, corporations have not yet figured a way to force us to do business with them. What do you do when airlines treat passengers like cattle? Don’t travel anywhere by plane. Incidentally, consuming less is probably the best thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprints. Mortgages do not necessarily increase one’s carbon footprint, but if enough people deny banks our business, maybe they will close some of their offices and turn off the electricity.
Of course we cannot buy nothing, but we can minimize what we buy, and thus our entanglement with the toxic and evil world of business. Business is not always toxic, but you can limit your purchases to corporations with proven reliability. As an author, it is in my interest to tell you to keep buying books, but I will admit that the public library is the better option in many cases. And you may discover that there are many beautiful and rewarding things around you that are free, not just books but time spent in the natural world.
Buying as little as possible is also the way to be spiritually free, as Jesus said but which Christian conservatives vehemently deny.
Actually, as a society, we are not free. The Constitution is a technicality, because we are ruled by corporations, who (yes, they insist that they are persons) act as though they have no responsibilities to you at all: you, but not they, are bound by contracts. We are their slaves.
My recent experience with this was an attempt to refinance a mortgage with Bank of America, regarding which I will say little, since you are not reading this to hear me complain. Since I have a perfect payment history, and since it was not a new property, they quickly pre-approved the loan. Then it quickly became what might have been a nightmare. They transferred my loan to a succession of five different people, and at each transition they misplaced paperwork which I dutifully re-sent. And they kept changing the arrangements on which we had agreed. I said this might have been a nightmare, but I had an option that kept it from being so. I have an existing mortgage, and there is nothing actually wrong with it. I could, and did, simply cancel the refinance process. I only wish I had checked online before I had applied for the refinance loan, and seen the prodigious number of consumer complaints about Bank of America. Bank of America is competent at just two things: taking taxpayer bailout money, and compensating their CEO. In fairness I will add that B of A repaid their $45 billion TARP loan.
My solution will work for you too, at least sometimes. Just say no. It is nearly unpatriotic to say this, but the most important thing we can do is to not buy things, whether mortgages or snack foods. Even though we are their slaves when we do business with them, corporations have not yet figured a way to force us to do business with them. What do you do when airlines treat passengers like cattle? Don’t travel anywhere by plane. Incidentally, consuming less is probably the best thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprints. Mortgages do not necessarily increase one’s carbon footprint, but if enough people deny banks our business, maybe they will close some of their offices and turn off the electricity.
Of course we cannot buy nothing, but we can minimize what we buy, and thus our entanglement with the toxic and evil world of business. Business is not always toxic, but you can limit your purchases to corporations with proven reliability. As an author, it is in my interest to tell you to keep buying books, but I will admit that the public library is the better option in many cases. And you may discover that there are many beautiful and rewarding things around you that are free, not just books but time spent in the natural world.
Buying as little as possible is also the way to be spiritually free, as Jesus said but which Christian conservatives vehemently deny.
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