Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (3). More agnosticism from Ecclesiastes

Today’s Bible Reading: Ecclesiastes 1:12–2:23.

The author of Ecclesiastes was apparently pretending to be Solomon, and claimed unsurpassed wealth, power, and wisdom. Who else, then, could be in such a perfect position to try to find out what is truly fulfilling in life? This reveals an astonishingly modern aspect to Ecclesiastes: its writer submitted this question to what we would today call a scientific test.

The writer (we will, for literature’s sake, call him Solomon) said that he accumulated tremendous riches and indulged in every pleasure that a man could imagine. He lacked only liquor (distillation had not yet been invented, I think) and electronic devices. He certainly had more sexual opportunity than any man today, with the possible exception of Tiger Woods. Were he living today, he would probably be one of the few private citizens to have gone into outer space. In this sense, Solomon was like his later namesake, Suleÿman the Magnificent, a medieval sultan of Asia Minor. Solomon’s conclusion: It was all vanity and striving after wind. Some people say that whoever dies with the most toys wins. Solomon would say, whoever dies with the most toys dies.

Next the writer tried wisdom—what we would today call intellectual pursuits. He found that intelligence was far better than ignorance: “Wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.” But he encountered the same problem with wisdom as with riches: when it’s all over, the wise man dies just like the fool.

And then he thought about future generations. Some people say, “What has posterity ever done for me?” Nevertheless, most humans think about posterity a lot. Solomon realized that whatever riches he accumulated and whatever wisdom he gained would all be left to whoever would come after him, “and who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?” You work all your life for riches, or for wisdom, then you leave it all to someone who has not had to work for it.

There is one option Solomon apparently did not consider. It was Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy: Nobody should die rich. Andrew Carnegie was extremely wealthy, but gave most of it away to build libraries and research institutions, many of which are still going strong almost a century later. But Solomon might just have said, maybe all the people who go into those libraries will go out just as stupid as they were when they went in.

So Solomon got himself into a deep depression. You work all day, and you worry about whether there is any point to doing it. And then at night you lie awake and worry about it some more. Were Solomon alive today, I am not sure that even trazodone or doxylamine or hypnosis tapes or valerian root would help him get to sleep. If “even in the night his mind does not rest,” nothing can help. If you believe that, no matter how hard you work, luck is the empress of the world, how can you ever feel satisfied?

This was the same feeling that the wanderer had in German poet Wilhelm Müller’s Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). No one would remember this mediocre poem were it not transformed into utter beauty by the music of Franz Schubert. In song number 17 (Im Dorfe; In the Village), the traveler hears dogs barking and the villagers are sleeping away in their beds. Schubert’s music depicts not only the growling of the dogs and the snoring, but also the traveler’s disdain at how these people could be so stupid that they could just sleep through the night without existential angst. They dream, and then in the morning they forget their dreams. The music then shifts from growling dogs and depression to the most beatific music I have ever heard! You gotta hear it. The traveler says, Je nun, je nun—and yet, and yet! The people have, in fact, seen splendid visions in their dreams, and what is so bad about that? If only Solomon could have done this. But Solomon, like Müller’s and Schubert’s traveler, trudged on in his bleak journey. I will tell you more about Die Winterreise in future posts.

I must stop here. Please come back, because I don’t want to leave you on this depressing note. There is a way to be happy despite these things, as Solomon subsequently wrote. I warn you, though, that there will be a few more depressing posts before that.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (2). Agnosticism from the writer of Ecclesiastes

Today’s Bible Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 1-11; 11: 13-14.

I am amazed that the Book of Ecclesiastes ever made it into the Bible. I can count with the fingers of one foot the number of times Ecclesiastes was ever deeply studied in any of the conservative churches to which I once belonged. Occasional quotes out of context, no more. Not something on any kid’s Sword of the Lord Bible Verse Memorization Chart.

The agnosticism expressed in this book is breathtaking. It is also very cynical, which is about all you could be if you did not believe that God rewarded good people on Earth and you had no alternative. Yet it made it into the Bible, along with the very sexy Song of Solomon which follows it.

And it is blazingly obvious that the last two verses were written by somebody else, which I paraphrase: “Okay, this has gone on long enough. So just get this straight. Don’t listen to all that stuff you just read. Just be afraid of God, be very afraid. Do what the priests tell you God wants you to do, for that is your entire purpose in life. God will announce every secret thought in your brain on judgment day, and everybody is going to know what you were thinking, you little wishy-washy doubters, and then you’ll be sooooooory!” But if you leave off those last two verses, the book of Ecclesiastes is the most heart-wrenchingly eloquent work of agnosticism that the ages have ever produced.

The writer (unlikely to have been Solomon, or a king at all) begins by describing the cycles of the universe. The sun goes around the Earth (from our perspective). The winds blow around the Earth. One generation of humans after another comes and goes. This could be made into an inspiring overview of the universe, but the writer made it cynical instead. All is vanity—that is, everything is a waste of time. He asks, what does a person gain from all of his work? And as the sun and the wind and the water go around and around, it is just such unutterable weariness! Modern historians debate over whether history is one damn thing after another or is the same damn thing over and over again. The writer of Ecclesiastes chose the latter. Not only is there nothing new under the sun, but nobody remembers what came before! This remains true today, when almost every detail of recent history is recorded; it is just that most of my students do not remember any of it.

In my youngest days, I found the hydrological cycle of the Earth (evaporation, condensation, rainfall, groundwater) to be inspiringly beautiful. Ecclesiastes has made it sad. But this was a necessary first step. Many religious people in that day (probably before 500 BCE) believed in a short history of the cosmos, from Eden until the day when God would establish his kingdom on Earth. Come to think of it, hundreds of millions of people still believe this. They do not believe that “what has been is what will be.” They do not believe that humans have been a very recent blip in the long history of the universe and the Earth. If we are now in the middle of the history of our universe—if the present were located at the pedestal of rocks near Smith Center, Kansas, which claims to be the geographical center of the United States—then a hundred-year lifespan is the width of a finger compared to the width of the North American continent. To the writer of Ecclesiastes, this realization was very humbling, and there was no scientific insight to replace it.

I find beauty and inspiration in the study of science, and in the slow work of doing things that help other people and the world. I am inspired by the fact that evolution has produced a human species capable of altruism. Alas, the writer of Ecclesiastes did not make it that far. I will have several more entries, in upcoming weeks, about Ecclesiastes.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (1)

I will begin a series of postings that deal with what is sometimes called theodicy. There does not appear to be a God who intervenes in the world to place any restraint upon evil, or to provide any encouragement to good. Theodicy is the branch of theology that tries to make excuses for this, and attempts to explain how an all-powerful God could allow the world to be so randomly cruel.

Of course, there are many beautiful things in the world and that have happened to each of us, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the beauty of nature and the intense satisfaction that I feel in my life and work. Please do not get the impression that I am a negative person, however cynical my theological speculations may at times be. In fact, I marvel at how lucky I have been, and reflect that I am not a better person than many people who suffer so horribly. How did I get so lucky as to be born in the United States—a nation that, imperfect as it is, at least has rights that are usually respected?

A friend and I recently watched a movie called Osama. It was set in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The movie was all in Pashtun, with English subtitles. It showed the incredible oppression and cruelty of the Taliban, as well as their glaring hypocrisies. It was about a family: a grandmother, a mother, and a girl. They needed an income, and the women were not allowed to earn one. So they decided to disguise the girl as a boy, named Osama, and he got a job. But the Taliban made all the boys go to a military camp, and while s/he was there, she had her first period and was discovered. Just before being stoned, she was spared, but sent to a fate worse than death. If you wish, I will tell you what it is later. Let me know. The response my friend and I had was, in what way do we deserve to escape such suffering?

Of course, there is no answer, because everything that happens is just luck. And I am not the only one who says so.

Consider the series of poems that composer Carl Orff used for his orchestral-choral masterpiece Carmina Burana. It is a primitive and rough piece of music that is almost frightening in its beauty. The poems were collected from medieval minstrels—some in Latin, some in German, some in a dialect that was French halfway evolved from Latin. They celebrate earthly things. Medieval times were supposed to be the age of faith when everybody thought God ruled over a small flat world. But these poems are often openly agnostic and reject the concept of Providence. The first poem in the series is Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi—Luck, Empress of the World.

O Fortuna
Velut Luna
Statu variabilis
Semper crescis
Aut decrescis
Vita detestabilis
Nunc obdurat
Et tunc durat
Ludo mentis aciem
Egestatem
Potestatem
Dissolvit ut glaciem.

Just read that—aloud—and hear the rhythm and rhymes. Powerful! It translates: “O luck, like the moon, changeable in state, you are always waxing or waning. Hateful life is at one moment hard and the next moment watches over the mind’s playfulness. Poverty, power, it melts like ice.” What forgotten minstrel composed these verses, saying that life was both hateful and playful?

The other source of ideas for this series of entries is nothing other than the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. It is breathtaking in its honesty about the randomness of fate. How did it ever make it into the Bible? I will explore the insights from both the medieval poetry and the Book of Ecclesiastes in upcoming days. Join me!

A thought from Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a famous anti-Christian philosopher and writer. He is one of the people that conservative religious people love to hate, those who still remember him. They like to portray him, as they portray all of the rest of us who reject their hard-line theology, as evil people. But I want to bring to your attention an important statement he made, and you tell me if you think this sounds like something an evil man would say:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

The Search for Evidences, part two

One of the most famous recent pieces of scientific research was an article that appeared in American Heart Journal in 2006. The lead author, Herbert Benson, is a physician at the Mind/Body Institute in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. His co-authors included other doctors, Ph.D.s in medical sciences, nurses, public health experts, and theologians. This extensive team conducted what is perhaps the best study to date of whether or not prayer works.

In this study, Benson and co-workers identified about 1,800 people with heart problems, and who were scheduled to have a heart bypass operation, in hospitals across the United States. The investigators wanted to know if intercessory prayer would help the patients recover from surgery. The experimental design would seem to be very simple: some of the patients would receive supplementary intercessory prayer, and some would not. (You cannot prevent people from praying, but the investigators arranged for Catholic and Protestant religious groups to pray for the list of patients, in addition to whatever prayer from friends and family they were already receiving.)

But there is a confounding factor in this approach. If the patients who received supplementary prayer knew they were receiving it, this might have a psychosomatic effect upon them. They might feel better, and even recover better, simply in the knowledge that they were being prayed for. The prayer itself might have no spiritual or miraculous effect. Benson and colleagues were aware of this, and they designed their experiment to avoid this problem. They divided the patients into three groups, not two. Patients in two of the groups were told that they might or might not receive extra prayer. The patients in these two groups therefore could not know whether they were receiving supplementary prayer. Of these two groups, one received supplementary prayer, and one did not. The patients in the third group were told that they would receive supplementary prayer, and they did.

The two groups that were uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer had virtually identical rates of complication following surgery. This demonstrated that prayer, itself, did not cause healing in these patients. The group that received prayer and knew it had, as predicted, a psychosomatic effect, only it was the opposite effect from what was expected. These patients actually had more complications after surgery. This surprising result could not be explained, except that perhaps it was performance anxiety: the patients knew that they should recover from surgery, because if they did not, they were letting God down.

These results have left religious people, who believe that God answers prayer, scrambling. Their most common response was that God simply refused to go along with the experiment. God refused to heal the heart patients because He did not want anybody investigating Him. (This seems a strange reason for a God of Love to let somebody die.) Of course, nobody can say. The experiment tells us nothing about what God, if any, might have been thinking. All it shows is that prayer does not reliably work.

So, just as with the near-death experiences, we are left with a jarring lack of evidence that there is a God or an afterlife.

Pat Robertson strikes again

First, let me thank you all for the very insightful comments I have received. I love hearing from you.

I wonder how many of you may have heard yesterday's news about what Pat Robertson, the infamous televangelist, said about the earthquake in Haiti. Robertson has a history of blaming the victims for tragedies, for example saying that the 9-11 attacks were God's retribution for the United States permitting the existence of gays and lesbians. He has been clinically crazy for at least ten years. His most recent statement was the most outrageous and damnable, if we can pass judgement on the words of an insane man. [He also claims to be able to leg press a ton, as a result of his special protein milkshake. I published a humorous depilation of this in the March-April 2007 Skeptical Inquirer. Unfortunately, the article is not yet available online for free.]

Here is what Robertson said: The reason that the earthquake had happened in Haiti was because, two hundred years ago, the Haitians had made a pact with the devil to the effect that, if the devil would drive out the French colonialists, they would serve him.

Big preachers like Robertson just assume that any thought that pops into their minds has come from God, and that they are personally incapable of error. If there is any such thing as blasphemy, this is it. Furthermore, Robertson and others like him have made God, if there is one, appear to be a monster. Only a Satan in the Sky would have sent or even permitted such an earthquake in response to deeds done (or not done; where is Robertson's evidence?) two centuries ago? I think conservative Christians should denounce Robertson for double blasphemy: for assuming he knows the whole mind of God, and for making God appear to be the equivalent of Satan.

I have little concern about the state of Robertson's soul or about his theology. He's insane. My problem is that thousands of people (enough to financially support a whole network) believe everything he says. Mindless followers of an insane person...has history not seen this before?

The search for evidences, part one

I used to be a creationist and a fundamentalist. I believed that there was historical and scientific evidence to verify a literal (or what I thought was a literal) interpretation of the Bible. Even long after I had left this viewpoint behind, I wanted desperately to have some evidence to verify that, at least, God exists and that there is a spiritual realm.

One of the pieces of evidence that I considered good, even though not perfect, was the Near Death Experience (NDE). This occurs when people who are in a coma believe that they are floating above and seeing their own bodies on the bed; who see and speak with departed loved ones; and who see a tunnel towards light, into which a powerful and serene spiritual being invites them. Then they come back from the brink of death—always, they report, unwillingly.

Of course, all of this could be hallucination, caused by oxygen deprivation. But in some cases, patients have reported seeing things that they could not have known—usually things that happened in the operating room. But this can be explained if we consider that, despite them being in a clinical coma, their senses may have been able to detect some information for later recall.

But one patient said she saw red shoes on the roof, which (the story goes) was later confirmed and which she could not have known if her spirit had not been halfway to Heaven.

What is needed is a scientific study. Enter Sam Parnia, M.D. He wrote a book in which he described a scientific study of NDE. It was a brilliant experimental design. It included ceiling tiles that had symbols printed on the upper side, which neither the patient nor the medical personnel could see, but which an ascending spirit might be able to see. I was very excited as I read the book. Unfortunately, the book was only about the experimental design; no results. Presumably Parnia did not yet have results, and will publish them later. We are waiting, Sam!

Meanwhile, I found out that electromagnetic stimulation of the right temporal lobe of the brain could induce mental images of the tunnel of light. This is experimental evidence, though not quite proof, that this part of the NDE is a hallucination. Certain drugs, such as ketamine, can stimulate something similar to an NDE. This was very disillusioning for me to discover. I can remember where I was standing, and where the television was, when I saw this on one of the educational cable channels in 1999.

Therefore, as to whether NDE reveal a spiritual realm beyond our physical bodies and ecosystems is something about which we must remain agnostic. I say this not because I wish to reject a spiritual realm, but in spite of wanting to believe in one.