Will Reason Triumph?

The new year is coming up. Are you ready for it? Neither is anybody else. The big problems continue to get worse, particularly the strain of human consumption and pollution upon the ecosystem of the Earth, and hardly anything is being done about it except by a minority of humanitarians. The Paris climate talks earlier this month produced a set of reasonable recommendations that will at least help make the impact of global climate change a little more manageable. But the political machine of America responded with a collective snort; Congress has declared that America will not cooperate at all with other nations to limit global warming. Most Republicans declare that (in words I heard one of them use) nothing will ever convince them of global warming. Nothing. Ever. This is a statement, pure and simple, that Republicans consider themselves to be totally incapable of error. They have carved out for themselves a niche that properly belongs to God, if there is One.

And a lot of the power behind the conservative declaration of infallibility is religion. They believe that God has made them incapable of error. God approves of everything they do. (Some of them might admit that, once in a while, they make a few tiny mistakes.) To win any argument, a conservative need do no more than hold his God Finger Puppet up in the air and wiggle it.

There is practically no hope that this will change. And that is because the human brain did not evolve to reason. It evolved to rationalize. That is, the human brain evolved to use information from the world to control other human beings. Sometimes they used reason to do this. But just as often they used fantasy. We are the evolutionary descendants of people whose brains allowed them to understand the world just enough to manipulate it and to dominate other human beings. Therefore, the coming year, and all years to come, will be just as unreasonable and dangerous as the previous year, as all previous years.

However much I admire the character of Perry Mason, as played by Raymond Burr, I must regretfully disagree with one of his statements. In a 1961 episode, a client named Fallon (one of thousands of wrongfully-accused defendants) thanked Perry Mason for not losing faith in him, to which Mason responded, “Oh, I always have faith, Mr. Fallon—faith in what Judge Learned Hand called ‘the eventual supremacy of reason.’” One of the reasons I have always enjoyed Perry Mason reruns is that I can fantasize, for a few moments, that truth will eventually triumph in the world, a fantasy that I know is not true.

Skin-Deep Savages

I’m tired of writing about racism, but it just keeps coming up! I wish it would just go away. But it won’t, so I keep writing about it. During this Christmas season, we are supposed to be thinking about good news of peace on Earth. But so long as we are still racist savages on the inside, we will never have peace on Earth. In fact, our technological interconnectedness can amplify, rather than dampen, our evil tendencies.

Author Derrick Jensen, in the preface to his book The Culture of Make Believe, describes one of the most disturbing incidents in the history of white/black relations in America. (It is very similar to many incidents in the history of white/Native relations.)

“In 1918, the husband of Mary Turner, a black woman from Valdosta, Georgia, was killed by a mob of white men, not for any offense he had committed, but rather because another black man had killed a white farmer. I do not know precisely how Turner’s husband died. I do not even know his name. I know only that in retaliation for the killing of the white farmer, many white citizens of Valdosta lynched eleven black men—who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color skin—before they shot and killed the man they were after.

“In the wake of her husband’s murder, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, vowed to avenge those who killed her husband. An Associated Press article later commented on her ‘unwise remarks, as well as her attitude.’ If you dig beneath the delicate language, it is easy to see what was coming. A mob of several hundred white men and women determined they would ‘teach her a lesson,’ or, perhaps more precisely, they would teach a lesson to those others who might be tempted to act as she did. They tied her ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. Then they doused her clothes with gasoline and burned them off of her. They used a hog-splitting knife to open her belly. Her infant fell to the ground, and cried briefly, until someone crushed the head with his heel. The mob then shot her, not once or twice, but hundreds of times.”

Surely, we think, we would not do something like that today. But underneath our thin skins, we still carry the emotions that, under the right conditions, could ignite into similar or greater levels of violence. Most of us have grown up learning not to think, feel, or act in this manner which is perhaps the worst imaginable offense to God, should God happen to exist. But the people of Valdosta, not quite a hundred years ago, were not very different from us. Human nature has not changed. This kind of behavior could happen again if sparked by the right circumstances.

In case you still think it is impossible, let me report what a colleague told me about a student in her class. He wrote his English composition term paper about how black people are inferior and should return to slavery. Did this person reach this conclusion by getting to know black people and, perhaps regretfully, concluding that they were not just slightly but so extremely inferior that they deserved subhuman status? No. He spewed out beliefs that had been implanted in a religious fashion and that he held with religious zeal. He refused to think for himself. We know this because his paper was plagiarized from a white supremacist website.

A Creation Story from the Yoruba People

When I teach evolution, I have a brief section about evolution and creation. It is a science course and I do not spend a lot of time on this. One of the things I do in this course is to introduce the students to versions of creation from outside Christianity, such as the new Native American creationism espoused by Vine Deloria Jr. and the Muslim creationism of Harun Yahya. But this semester, I had two students from Africa. One of them told me about the creation stories of her people, the Yoruba. I would like to present the account that she gave to us, the ÌTÀN ÌSÈDÁ ÃYÉ.

“In the beginning of the world, there was nothing except a ball of water. And Olódùmãrè (the Almighty) sent Õdùduwà to Òbìrí Ãyé (the round Earth) to plant the earth. Õdùduwà left heaven with a horn full of sand and a chicken. He poured (planted) the sand on the surface of water, so that he can step on a ground. He then placed the chicken on the ground. The chicken helped spread the sand all over. The areas where the chicken was able to reach are the land we have today. Õdùduwà saw to it that the surface of the earth was covered part land and water so that there is a form. And several years passed by………………..

“Meanwhile, Sokoti (the blacksmith of heaven) has been assigned to mold every form of creature he could imagine to fill the formed earth. Sokoti used his artistic ability to mold different kinds of creatures with different colors and skins. Unfortunately, Sokoti was a drunkard. This made it hard for him to get his job done right. One day in his drunken state, he molded different forms of creatures and sent them to earth without a quality test of assurance. These creatures were the monkeys, baboons, chimps, and gorillas.

“On one of his sober days, Sokoti framed out a fine creature and made different forms it in various colors and diversity with sand, clay, and mud. Some he fashioned them with large breasts, and left some bare. He created them such that they were like a puzzle that could fit into each other. These creatures were the most perfect of all he had made. He sent them into the world and they were called Eniyan (humans).

“After few years, there was conflict between the apes and humans. They couldn’t live together in harmony. The apes were rejected and ignored by humans. They decided to end this conflict by consulting with each other. They chose a representative who will go to Olódùmãrè on their behalf. Olódùmãrè gave instructions that they should congregate at the mountain in three days time, where he would prepare a potion of oil in a giant basin. They are to rub their skin with this oil to become human. The apes were so excited that they drank, danced and forgot what day it was. By the time they remembered, the oil had almost dried up. They managed to rub their faces, hands, and feet with the remaining oil but it wasn’t enough. Some rub their butts and chests against the basin, but still not enough. This is why apes have faces, hands, butts, and feet that are almost bare.”

This story illustrates two things. First, it shows that there are many creation accounts. Christian creationists assume that disproving evolution would prove their version of Christianity. Second, it shows how a supposed harmony between creation and evolution can be forced, no matter what kind of creationism it is. It can be Christian creationism, as when generations of religious scientists have tried to harmonize Genesis and geology. But it can also be done with the Yoruba account. As my student explained, the primordial Earth was mostly water (the continents arose later); this is the Òbìrí Ãyé of the legend. The adiye chicken could have been a tyrannosaur or an archaeopteryx. It took time for Sokoti to perfect the design of the human, just as it took evolution a long time to produce us. Sokoti used different materials, such as sand or clay, of different textures and colors to produce different species, and different human races, just as evolution has produced diversity. And Sokoti, like sexual selection, produced genders of humans who fit together like puzzle pieces. See? The Yoruba legend fits together with modern science!

Attempts to reconcile religion and science, from Augustine to Francis Collins in the western world, and all over the world, is an exercise in creativity rather than a discovery of truth.

I appreciate the contribution that my student made to our class, and I think no one in the class (except the other Yoruba student) had experienced anything like it.

Bible Faith and Bible Understanding

This fall, I administered a questionnaire (as per guidelines of our Institutional Research Board) to my classes. I have tabulated the results from my evolution class. I work at a small regional university in the jewel at the middle of the buckle of the Bible belt. This year, I kept two groups of questionnaires separate: those who accept the Bible as a, or the, holy book, and those who do not.

You probably expect that the class had a lot of creationists. But, when you think about it, you realize that this is unlikely to be the case, since the class is an elective and creationists tend to stay away from it. Even within this class, I have noticed that one student who expressed a distaste for the subject (maybe he thought it would be an easy A) signs his name on the attendance sheet and leaves (and seems to think I don’t notice). Not only does this suggest that he does not want to deal with the evidence, but he is being dishonest by taking credit for attending a class when he was not there after the first minute. On the other hand, I have had some very smart and honest creationists in the class over the years. Still, one should not be surprised at the makeup of the class. Of those who accept the Bible as holy, about 75 percent are theistic evolutionists (who believe God created the world through the process of evolution). Only one respondent identified him or herself as a young-earth creationist. Of the non-believers, three of five said evolution was responsible for the world being the way it is. My class is hardly polarized at the extremes; most people are somewhere in the middle.

First, those who consider the Bible to be a, or the, holy text. Eighty-two percent said that they know a lot about the Bible, and 45 percent said they had read the entire Bible at least once. Sounds like these people should know their religion, at least. However, they did not do so well on the general questions about Biblical knowledge. These questions included:

• Who David was, or who Abram was
• How many tribes of Israel there were, or how many plagues of Egypt there were
• About how many books are in the Bible
• That the prophets of the Old Testament called for the rich to stop oppressing the poor
• That the Old Testament prohibits eating shellfish

I also included, in the general Bible questions, a couple that should have been very easy to answer: about whether the Catholic and Protestant Bibles have the same books, and whether the Bible was originally written in English. This last questions sounds really strange, and in fact all respondents knew the Bible was not originally written in English, but there is a church right outside of town that considers the King James Bible to be the inspired Bible—not the earlier versions.

I also asked some specific questions that are very interesting and relevant to modern issues.

• The Old Testament commands agricultural land be left fallow every seven years, a practice known as the “Sabbath of the fields.” That is, the Old Testament commands sustainable agriculture.
• The Old Testament commands that all debts be forgiven and all land returned to its original owners every fifty years (a practice known as Jubilee). If this command were really carried out, it would mean the collapse of the capitalist system. Can you imagine Bank of America doing this? Not only will they not forgive debts, but they make sneaky policy changes to trick customers into having even more debt. Thanks, Moses.
• The Old Testament permitted slavery and it actually says, regarding the slave-owner, “The slave is his money.” Guess what: the Confederates (who still fly their flags proudly in Oklahoma) believed that black slaves were not people, but property. Thanks, Abraham Lincoln.
• Most religious people consider abortion to be murder. Inconveniently, the Old Testament says that if a man injures a woman such that it causes a miscarriage, this is not treated as a murder but as what we would call a misdemeanor, requiring monetary restitution.
• The Old Testament specifies certain rights that foreigners residing within Israel have; it does not prohibit foreigners from living in Israel.

Second, the students who do not consider the Bible to be a holy text. Two-thirds of them said they know a lot about the Bible. And 38 percent of them said they had read the Bible at least once. Some of these, at least, were raised in a religious tradition and then left it.

This chart summarizes the differences between the Bible-believers and the non-believers, first in terms of general knowledge then knowledge of the specific questions.

Percent correct responses
Topic	Believers	Non-believers
General knowledge: mean	60%	61%
General knowledge: range	31-87%	40-88%
Sabbath of the fields	83%	100%
Jubilee	27%	56%
OT permits slavery	58%	67%
Killing a fetus is not murder	36%	57%
OT does not prohibit aliens	36%	28%

These results indicate that (if these students represent the general population) the non-believers know just as much about the Bible as the believers do. In fact, when it comes to Bible passages that are relevant to modern issues such as agriculture, economics, slavery, abortion, and refugees, the non-believers know more about the Bible than the believers do, sometimes by a wide margin.

The tentative conclusions I draw are the following:

• Believers believe the Bible but are no more likely to know what it says than non-believers, in terms of general Biblical knowledge that is not directly relevant to modern issues.
• Believers know less than non-believers about those parts of the Bible that address modern issues. This may be because their preachers actually feed them misinformation, proclaiming that the Bible champions capitalism and prohibits aliens from living in God’s land (which many of them consider to be the United States). That is, I suspect that preachers have actively led their followers to believe more wrong things about the Bible than do non-believers. Conversely, non-believers are more likely to know things about the Bible that are embarrassing to modern believers.

My main recommendation, from these responses, is this. If you base your political and scientific opinions upon the Bible, you should read it first.

I also posted this essay on my evolution blog.