Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I realize that I am adding my voice to the discussion about Sam Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, long after its initial publication and after many others have spoken. My excuse is that I have only now read it.

Harris spends a lot of time in his book going over what I consider the prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. Of course there is a difference between right and wrong. Of course we should all act in ways that contribute the most to the general well-being. I am astonished that cultural relativists still exist and stand ready to exonerate evil practices simply because one society or another may consider them a cultural norm. If a tribe somewhere practices human sacrifice, it is simply wrong, even if it is a cherished tradition within that culture. I am astonished that some liberals defend the right of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists to invite thirteen-year-old girls to be one of their many concubines (unofficial wives). (The mainstream Mormon church abandoned this practice in the late nineteenth century.) The thirteen-year-old girls cannot freely choose to be “multiple wives.” They are too young to understand what they are doing, and are easily overwhelmed by the powerful church leader who tells them that they will go to hell if they do not submit to being a multiple wife. (I obtained this information from a different book, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.) We all know this and there is no point in wasting time discussing such points with cultural relativists. They have had a field day attacking Harris with their own brand of fundamentalism: the unswerving belief that there is no absolute morality. So one problem I had with Harris’s book was that it defends an idea nearly all of us already know.

But there was a problem with Harris’s approach. He said that science can determine what is right and wrong. I do not believe that science is equipped to do this. I suggest that it is much easier if we take an evolutionary approach. Perhaps our major human evolutionary adaptation is altruism. Therefore, for our species, and probably for all other intelligent social species in the universe, things are good if they promote general altruism, and bad if they erode it. By general altruism, I mean for everybody, not just for your own rapacious tribe. Altruism can be scientifically studied. The only assumption we have to make is that this adaptation is not only successful but good. We have to start with some assumption somewhere. Harris points out that scientists assume the scientific method is good; that it is good to be honest about data and to be logically consistent about reasoning.

So I believe that Harris reached the right conclusion, and did so by the right path. He just apparently misnamed the path, calling it science instead of altruism. And we can scientifically study the degree to which any given behavior enhances altruism. Anyone who questions the goodness of altruism does not understand our species very well.



This entry will also appear in my evolution blog.

The Evolution of Christian Science

In May and June of this year, I took a journey out to California, and saw and filmed many natural wonders. I am posting several essays about this trip on my evolution blog. I have chosen a few of them for this blog also, because of their relationship to religion and science and human experience.

On June 9, I had the privilege of participating in a Victorian garden party in Pasadena, dressed as Charles Darwin. It was a fundraiser for Opera a la Carte, the opera company with which my college friend Carol has been working for many years.

Carol has other jobs as well. One of them is to be a singer for a Christian Science church in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, a job she has had for years even though she is not a member of that religious persuasion. I can never get enough of hearing Carol’s beautiful voice, even if it means sitting through a Christian Science service. But, the ever alert naturalist, I listened to and analyzed what the Christian Scientists were saying.

Christian Science began with the visions—most of us say delusions, her followers would say revelations—of Mary Baker Eddy in nineteenth century America. By chance, I also happened to be reading a book about the history and current controversies of the Mormon church, which began about the same time. The United States was a frontier country. America had been founded by breaking with European tradition of loyalty to monarchs and to state-supported churches. Many new religions, led by self-styled prophets, began at this time. They appealed to direct experience, and to divine revelation (indistinguishable from delusion by our mere human brains). They were like weeds growing in a field after a fire. Most of them, like most of the plants of the field, died out. But the legacies of Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy live on. Mormonism has become a major political force, devoted as unswervingly to the political right as it is to God, while Christian Science has not fulfilled Mark Twain’s fear that it would become the religion that conquered American thought and action.

Today, Christian Science is known mainly for its opposition to conventional medical practice. Church services consist mainly of singing and of readings (without sermon comment) from the Bible and from the Mary Baker Eddy scriptures. On a previous visit to this church in 2006, the Eddy reading was something like (in my imperfect memory), “Do you have a carbuncle? Well, you don’t really have a carbuncle. The carbuncle is just an illusion.” Most of us think, how could these people be so delusional? But consider this. At the time that Mary Baker Eddy started Christian Science, conventional medical science was a bunch of snake-oil hokum. Eddy wrote against the scientific idea of a life force—an idea that has been long abandoned. Strange as it may seem, Eddy was appealing to reason and experience. Since its inception, Christian Science has ossified into a belief system that is impervious to new discoveries, and today is a carbuncle afloat on a sea of scientific evidence but which absorbs none of it. The Mormon Church has at least incorporated a little bit of new evidence—it now rejects polygamy and admits black men into its priesthood of believers. But it, too, has largely become an impervious bubble of ignorance. There is simply no archaeological evidence of the great battle between the fair children of God and the swarthy Native American children of evil which even mainstream Mormons continue to commemorate at their Hill Cumorah site.

Still, I left with a little more respect for Christian Science. At its inception, it was perhaps a viable alternative view, even testable by scientific hypotheses. Mary Baker Eddy was even open to the insights of Charles Darwin. But that was a long time ago.

A version of this essay also appeared on my evolution blog recently.

A World of Empathy, Part Three: Graham Greene and Miracles

To a fundamentalist, a miracle is something that must violate the patterns of nature. Therefore if medicine heals a sick person, they must deny that it was the medicine; they must believe that God did it in some spiritual way, if only that God “guided the hands of the doctor” as if the doctor had become some kind of automaton who watched his hands being moved by a mysterious force invocable by fundamentalists. Even mainstream Christians, such as Catholics, believe this: Jesus’ conception could not have been a sperm finding an egg, but had to be immaculate, that is, through some kind of miraculous creation of a sperm nucleus already inside of Mary’s ovum.

But to many religious people, there is no clear distinction between natural events and miracles. God works through natural laws (including evolution). To those of us who are skeptical, this means that the religious explanation might as well not even be there. But to some religious people, such as those of whom the novelist Graham Greene wrote, it might be us skeptics who are taking the wrong interpretation.

Here is a passage from The Power and the Glory, presenting this idea. The communist atheist captor told the priest, “I can’t think how a man like you can believe those things. The Indians, yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light, they think it’s a miracle.”

“And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too,” [the priest said.] “It’s funny, isn’t it? Oh, it isn’t a case of miracles not happening—it’s just a case of people calling them something else. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life and they all—what’s the expression?—reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like. Then it happens again and again perhaps—because God’s about on Earth—and they say: There aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say that science has again disproved a miracle.”

Even if we succeed in showing that everything that happens is due only to physical causation, we should be careful not to dismiss them. To a person with religious sensitivities, such as a Christian agnostic, even ordinary events are “everyday miracles” for which we can feel deep gratitude.

A World of Empathy, Part Two: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

I introduced Graham Greene in a previous blog entry. The Power and the Glory takes place in a bit of Mexican history that I had known nothing about. Apparently there were Marxists revolutions in some Mexican states in the mid-twentieth century, in which churches were shut down and priests, except those who renounced their work, were executed.

The protagonist (Padre José) was a priest who knew his own inadequacy, which included a weakness for alcohol. But he knew that he was a priest, and couldn’t ever quit being a priest, a fact to which his own unworthiness was irrelevant. He had a burden of love, of pity, for all of the Catholics-in-hiding in the Marxist state. Every time that he had a chance to escape, he gave it up in order to administer last rites.

As with the protagonists in other Greene novels, the priest finds out that his empathy for people entraps him in conflicting feelings. Other priests have given into the revolutionaries, and he wonders if his refusal to also renounce his faith was just pride. And he also discovered that he could simply not stop being a priest even if he wanted to. When he was in prison, he was hearing the confessions of the other prisoners, even though they did not know he was a priest (since he was in disguise). The Catholics in hiding knew who he was but would not point him out to the revolutionary authorities. He knew that the man who was following him, a sallow ugly man with fangs, recognized him as the fugitive priest and planned to turn him in for a reward, but he could not help but give the man a ride on his mule when the man was sick. He could not avoid helping his Judas. Perhaps the worst conflict in the priest’s heart was the fact that the revolutionaries had shot hostages who refused to identify him: his military captor told him, “’I’ve shot three hostages because of you.’” If people had died for him, they deserved a saint, not a drunkard.

The priest was always thinking about his own sinfulness, and that of the world, even when he looked at the stars. “The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise—the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.” But he could not not be a priest: “But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God.”

And like most Greene protagonist, the priest knew that suffering was an unavoidable flip side to joy. He told his secret parishioners, “One of the fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is a part of joy…Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger…that is all a part of heaven…” From this he concludes that heaven is right here on Earth. And here was the pitiful (pity-filled) love that the priest could not avoid: “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”

To the priest, God’s love was even frightening in its intensity. “God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint-pot of ditch water. We wouldn’t even recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead to walking in the dark? Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

The central point of the novel is in this quote. Upon hearing yet another confession about sexual sin, the priest thought: “Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or for a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” This important thought is something that would never have gone through the mind of a Protestant or Catholic fundamentalist.

It was pity that brought the priest to his death, and he knew this would happen the moment he chose to show pity. He had escaped to a state where religion was not prohibited, but the ugly fanged man found him, and told him that he was needed to offer last rites to someone back in the state he had left. The priest knew it was a trap, but he knew it was his responsibility to go. Of course, he was arrested and executed. Greene brought all the plot lines together at the end of the novel: at the end, the dentist who had met the priest at the beginning of the novel now watched his execution from his office window. The dentist’s patient, writhing in pain, was the military leader who had ordered the execution.

Greene’s point was that the priest, despite his own sins and doubts, was in fact a saint, because he loved people unto death. This is the kind of religion that an agnostic can comprehend and admire.

The Republican Brain--in Oklahoma

This morning, at the commencement at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, the keynote speaker was Mr. Jerry Buchanan, a prominent Republican from Tulsa. During his speech, he made reference to “Obama bin Laden.” He then made a perfunctory apology, but due to his gestures (including a grin and putting his thumb to his mouth) I inferred that the apology was not sincere.


Events such as this make me wonder if Republicans consider Democrats to not be fellow Americans but to be outsiders, even enemies. Throughout human history, our species has drawn lines between insiders, whom we treat with altruism, and outsiders, whom we despise. We have steadily encompassed more and more people, and even other species and the Earth, into the “insider” group. But in Oklahoma it appears that this process is reversing. It hasn’t always been this way. Back when Republicans hated Bill Clinton, they never implied that he was a terrorist, or in other ways spewed the hatred that they now spew toward President Obama. Whether this is because the Republican Party has changed from being the party of right wing activism to being the party of personal animosity toward others, or whether it is because Obama is (part) black and Clinton is white, I cannot say.

And this is exactly what we would expect from the way the “Republican brain” works. This phrase is in the title of Chris Mooney’s new book. Mooney (author of such previous works as The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America) uses recent research into psychology to say that people whose brains have an intolerance of ambiguity tend to join the Republican Party. The process is quite simple. Some people’s brains make them believe that everything is either totally right or totally wrong; and that whatever they happen to believe is totally right; and that anyone who disagrees with them is therefore not only wrong but evil; and that they are right (or blessed by God) whenever they take actions against other people that would, in most circumstances, be considered wrong. That is, when such people are “standing up for their beliefs,” no amount of ridicule or insult or misinformation is too much to heap upon others, and God releases them from moral and legal obligations when they attack others. While this is a perfect description of Republicans, it also describes extreme liberals; however, there just aren’t enough extreme liberals to bother talking about them. And it is obvious to readers of this blog that this is the way the minds of religious conservatives work.

I believe that this was what was happening in the mind of the commencement speaker this morning. Perhaps he believes that he should extend the normal respect of shared citizenship to President Obama, but subconsciously his brain is telling him that the president is related conceptually to terrorism. And I believe that this is also why most of the audience thought it was funny.
I confronted the speaker about this afterward. The speaker had told the graduates that their words should be positive, to create a positive future for themselves and a positive environment for everyone. And he had make explicit reference to Christianity being advanced by positive words. I told him that his words about “Obama bin Laden” were not positive, but were highly insulting. He agreed. He insisted that it was a Freudian slip. I asked him to write a letter of apology to President Obama, and he promised to do so. I went up to him again and told him that his apology makes a great deal of difference. And that is why I am telling you about it. I will probably never know whether he actually sends an apology, but for the record, he apologized.

It is the Freudian part that I am writing about. I actually believe that Jerry Buchanan just made a mistake. But associating people who disagree with them, especially President Obama, with evil comes naturally and subconsciously to Republicans and to conservative Christians, and it slips out even when they do not intend it to—even when they do not consciously believe it, or just when they think it is bad publicity to say it. And the laughter of the crowd tells me that Oklahoma is dangerously Red. Dangerous, because they can say all kinds of hostile and inflammatory things before they even realize what they are doing. Will actions follow words? History, even recent history, even recent American history, does not offer us complete assurance that we have nothing to worry about, especially since there are enough guns in Oklahoma to supply an army as large as that of some nations. As long as the Oklahoma House opens its sessions with creationist rants (see March 20 entry on my evolution blog) and the people of Oklahoma think that it is funny to associate the name of the president with terrorism, the ground is fertile for real trouble.

A World of Empathy, Part One: The Novels of Graham Greene

In the event that this website malfunctions, please check my website http://www.stanleyrice.com/.

Graham Greene was a British novelist of the mid-twentieth century. I have just finished reading three of his novels, and will probably read more, because his novels are some of the best that I have ever read in which deep religious issues are brought to life.

Greene’s novels would probably not be published today by publishers of Christian literature, because they insist on heroes who are absolutely certain about every detail of theology. Very clear and stark good and evil: this is what Christian publishers want. And most secular publishers do not want any religious characters who are not blatant hypocrites or filled with religious hatred. In modern literature, with the exception of things such as the novels of Mary Doria Russell, religious characters have to be completely good or completely evil. But Graham Greene wrote about the impossibility of being sure what is good and what is evil. This makes his novels irresistible reading for a Christian agnostic.

Greene adopted Catholicism, and whether he actually believed all of the doctrine, he certainly understood its significance, and could create sympathetic characters who believed them. If it is true that the eucharist really is the body and blood of Jesus, really, not just symbolically, and if (as the Bible says) you eat and drink damnation unto yourself if you partake of it while in a state of mortal sin, then this has some real-world consequences. You can reject it, but if you accept it, you have to face up to what it means.

Greene’s novels also focus on people who, despite themselves, have empathy, a true selfless love, for other people. We are all trapped by the web of love for others, which leads to contradictions that cannot be avoided. You can ignore it, but if you accept it, you have to face up to what it means.

Greene faces up to both of these things in two novels: The Power and the Glory, and The Heart of the Matter. In the first, a priest understands himself as a sinner, but he cannot stop being a priest, even if it sends him to his death. In the second, a man trapped by his love for two women chooses to damn himself rather than to hurt either of them.

From inside the mind of one character in The Heart of the Matter, Greene writes, “How absurd it is to expect happiness in a world so full of misery…Point me out the happy man, and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance…If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they call the heart of the matter?” That is Greene’s point: the world is thick with the bonds of empathy, even pity, which both makes it good and fills it with misery.

In the next entry, I will explore some of the ideas in what is considered Greene’s greatest novel, The Power and the Glory.

The Armageddon Mindset

According to a 1999 poll, which is the most recent data I could find, 40 percent of Americans believe the world will end in a battle of Armageddon. About 45 percent of these people believe that the Antichrist is on the Earth now, and that Armageddon will happen during their lifetimes. This means that 18 percent of Americans believe that there is no future to the world past the end of their lifetimes. This is a large enough segment of the population that it is politically important, especially within the Republican Party.

Two things are impossible if you really believe that the world is ending soon. First, it is impossible to take any serious action about any environmental issue. We environmentalists can explain all day long that environmental destruction, particularly global warming, will prove disastrous to people in the future—in fact, in the near future. People who believe there is no future find such concerns literally incomprehensible. They may, in principle, assert that God is the Creator and we have no right to destroy the creation, but they simply cannot convince themselves of this, no matter how hard they try.

Second, it is impossible to take any serious action about fiscal responsibility. People with the Armageddon mindset overwhelmingly want the government to spend less money. But the reason is not in order for the government to have a sustainable future—since there will be no future—but in order to not have to pay taxes. Evidence for this is that these people call for unlimited spending on defense, which just might hurry up the Armageddon that they anticipate. They talk about the future of their children—a future they believe will not exist on Earth—and may try hard to believe it, but they cannot convince themselves of this, no matter how hard they try.

The Armageddon mindset is totally incompatible with any kind of scientific thought. This website is about ecology and evolution, about the effects of evolution on humans and the relationship between humans and the global ecosystem. The Armageddon mindset cannot be touched by reason or evidence, or perhaps even by direct experience. The only thing that scientists or scientifically-minded citizens can do is to write off the Armageddon folks and not even try to talk with them. Unfortunately, they are a major political force.

What should thoughtful people do about this, if anything? Please post your responses in the comment box below if your browser shows it; otherwise send comments to abutilongr@gmail.com. I hope you can enlighten me with some uplifting thoughts. This essay will appear soon on my website.