Last night (October 29), Jupiter was in opposition to the Earth, which means that it is exactly opposite the sun, and that it is as close as it is going to be this year. I do not know if it is the closest that it has ever been to the Earth, but it is close enough that even an inexpensive telescope will allow you to see its banded clouds. I have not yet seen the red spot, however. Jupiter is easily the brightest object in the sky after sunset. It rises about 8:30 local time.
The most amazing thing about looking at Jupiter is that you can see its moons. If you look at it on successive nights, you will see that the moons move quite rapidly—not rapidly enough to see, but enough that they are in strikingly different conformations each night. It was not just the moons, but the movement of the moons, that Galileo observed, and which led him to understand that Jupiter was a planet with its own moons. Jupiter was not just a bright light on a sphere that turned around the Earth. When Galileo made these observations, the medieval view of the cosmos fell apart, and those whose power depended on the medieval mindset (the Church) reacted with ferocity. The outcome of the Church’s attack on Galileo is well known.
You can get out a telescope and observe the very thing that got Galileo in trouble and changed the human view of the cosmos.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Christianity’s Long Tradition of Hating Science
I highly recommend the movie Agora, which depicts the life and death of the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in Alexandria, about 400 CE. An agora is a marketplace, in this place the marketplace of ideas in ancient Alexandria where Egyptian paganism, early Christianity, and early science were all in public view. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the Christians of Alexandria seized power and suppressed the marketplace of ideas, replacing it with religious dictatorship. This was the main theme of the movie: both the leader of a Christian terrorist organization, and Cyril, who is today esteemed as a great figure in church history, used violence to suppress scientific inquiry. In particular, Cyril used a passage from the writings of Paul (which, it turns out, was inserted into Paul’s writing by a later religious leader) to condemn Hypatia for being a woman who dared to teach men. You cannot watch this movie without coming away with a dark understanding that the early Christian church, far from being a community of love that welcomed the downtrodden of the world into its embrace, was little different from a terrorist organization, and hated scientific inquiry. The Christian terrorist leader gave bread to the poor with the conscious purpose of recruiting them as rioters to take over the city of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, at the end, the Christians strip Hypatia, stone her, mutilate her, and drag her through the streets of Alexandria for the glory of God and Jesus Christ.
Of course, we all know that many Christian thinkers have embraced scientific inquiry. But the historical facts, as dramatized in this movie, show that this is not how the Christian church got started. It got started as a way of violently repressing all freedom of thought. Christian philosophers and scientists came later, and always represented a minority within Christianity. To this day, among conservative Christians, there are far more people who merely want to use religion as a way of controlling the minds of others, and of grabbing political power, than people who truly want to understand the universe from a Christian viewpoint. Back when I was a Christian intellectual, a member of the American Scientific Affiliation and a professor at Christian colleges, it was clear to me that Christian intellectuals were as out of place in most conservative churches as were non-Christian intellectuals. Christian scientific inquiry exists, but is almost invisible against the flames of conservative Christian suppression of science. The pursuit of knowledge was, and is, an artificial and withering graft onto the corpus of conservative Christianity.
A secondary theme in the movie was the utter joy that Hypatia experienced when she finally understood how the planets revolved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. This joy was in her heart as she walked out into the street to offer herself as a sacrifice to the Christian terrorists. We do not know if the historical Hypatia figured out the discoveries usually attributed to Kepler, over a millennium later, but she might have: her works have all been destroyed, perhaps by Christians of fifth-century Alexandria who insisted that a flat, unmoving Earth was the only belief that should be permitted.
The dark repressive attitude of the Christian church, even in its earliest centuries, contrasts starkly with the brilliant embrace of wisdom that Jesus had. Within a century of Jesus’ death, his church had turned into a political force that would gladly have impaled its own founder on a stake for daring to preach love and forgiveness and for going out onto the hillsides to try to learn about the world through observation.
Even today, most churches are merely mechanisms for extracting money from and exercising control over the minds of people who are looking for love. Not all churches are like this, and there are individual exceptions within most churches. But as an expression of human thought and a conduit of love and altruism, religion has little to recommend it. If you want to learn the truth about the world and how to live, study science, and read the words of Jesus, but don’t bother with any Christianity that came after Jesus.
Of course, we all know that many Christian thinkers have embraced scientific inquiry. But the historical facts, as dramatized in this movie, show that this is not how the Christian church got started. It got started as a way of violently repressing all freedom of thought. Christian philosophers and scientists came later, and always represented a minority within Christianity. To this day, among conservative Christians, there are far more people who merely want to use religion as a way of controlling the minds of others, and of grabbing political power, than people who truly want to understand the universe from a Christian viewpoint. Back when I was a Christian intellectual, a member of the American Scientific Affiliation and a professor at Christian colleges, it was clear to me that Christian intellectuals were as out of place in most conservative churches as were non-Christian intellectuals. Christian scientific inquiry exists, but is almost invisible against the flames of conservative Christian suppression of science. The pursuit of knowledge was, and is, an artificial and withering graft onto the corpus of conservative Christianity.
A secondary theme in the movie was the utter joy that Hypatia experienced when she finally understood how the planets revolved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. This joy was in her heart as she walked out into the street to offer herself as a sacrifice to the Christian terrorists. We do not know if the historical Hypatia figured out the discoveries usually attributed to Kepler, over a millennium later, but she might have: her works have all been destroyed, perhaps by Christians of fifth-century Alexandria who insisted that a flat, unmoving Earth was the only belief that should be permitted.
The dark repressive attitude of the Christian church, even in its earliest centuries, contrasts starkly with the brilliant embrace of wisdom that Jesus had. Within a century of Jesus’ death, his church had turned into a political force that would gladly have impaled its own founder on a stake for daring to preach love and forgiveness and for going out onto the hillsides to try to learn about the world through observation.
Even today, most churches are merely mechanisms for extracting money from and exercising control over the minds of people who are looking for love. Not all churches are like this, and there are individual exceptions within most churches. But as an expression of human thought and a conduit of love and altruism, religion has little to recommend it. If you want to learn the truth about the world and how to live, study science, and read the words of Jesus, but don’t bother with any Christianity that came after Jesus.
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Evolution of Religion, part two
The following is a continuation of the entry, “religion, evolution of,” from the Revised Edition of my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012.
Memes: The Software of Religion
The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. The above experiences, such as a sense of disembodiment, will create a compulsion to explain them, an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and the result is a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.
Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by altered mental states, induced by natural compounds (such as psilocybin in some mushrooms), sensory deprivation (as in a cave), ritual rhythmicity, or particularly vivid dreams. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made humans eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. Humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences, and religious memes satisfied this desire.
One of the most important religion memes is guilt. Throughout human prehistory and history, religious leaders have parasitized the human capacity for guilt to reinforce their power over the minds of their followers, and religion has been one of the principal means by which they have done so.
The Evolutionary Advantages of Religion
Religion would probably have been a local aberration in early human populations had it not provided some evolutionary advantage. In modern tribal societies, shamans who claim to have exceptional religious experiences have considerable social power, which can translate into greater resources and reproductive opportunities; no doubt this was also the case during the prehistory of Homo sapiens. David Lewis-Williams points out that this would be the same in the Lascaux cave as in modern charismatic Christianity. Religious leaders would gain the within-population fitness advantage that is necessary for natural selection. Once the trait was established or at least common within a tribe, this tribe would have advantages over tribes that did not possess it—for example, social cohesion and identity that allowed them to prevail in conflicts. Clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would experience a cascade of benefits.
Another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated is the instinct of biophilia. Humans have a natural passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping and roaring inhabitants. To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them. Biophilia, and religious expressions of it, is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in, and has probably helped numerous individuals and tribes to persist through unspeakable hardships.
Although all Homo sapiens groups have religion, there was a striking development of religion when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and later when the most recent ice age forced Northern European tribes southward where they encountered disturbingly intelligent people that already lived in Southern Europe. Religion then functioned in tribal identity. Evidence for the tribal identity function is that there were geographical differences in types and styles of artwork—for example, different caves specialized on different animals, reflecting differences in established traditions.
There have been many different attempted explanations of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Some anthropologists say that the paintings were sympathetic magic to promote successful hunting. However, as David Lewis-Williams points out, the set of animals in the paintings is not the same as the animals that the people ate (for example, they did not eat bears and lions), and only 15 percent of the paintings show animals with spears. The paintings resemble animal visions that people might have seen during hallucinations. The animal paintings are often accompanied by geometric symbols that resemble the images seen during migraines. The animal images are not in their natural habitats, and appear to be floating, and sometimes lack hooves.
To the Cro-Magnon, as to many recent tribal peoples, the wall of a cave may have represented an interface between the outer world and the underworld. When the prehistoric people entered a cave, they were literally entering the underworld. In the darkness they would hallucinate from sensory deprivation, and possibly also from the high levels of carbon dioxide. Then when the lamps were lit, they would paint the images they had seen. Sometimes the artists would also paint their hands, leaving either positive or negative images of them, as a mark of direct contact with the underworld. Hand contact with the wall, and the process of spit-painting, were part of the overall religious experience. The visionary quality of the paintings is particularly evident in the deepest recesses of the caves, some as much as a kilometer underground, where quick sketches of many animals overlapped.
In addition to the individual religious experience, there was also a communal aspect. Religious shamans could gain admiration from their followers by taking them deep into the caves to see the evidence of their religious experiences. Meanwhile, the shallower reaches of the cave served as the assembly rooms for the general population, and it is in such places that the large, vivid images are found. The cave paintings may therefore have served to increase the social status and the fitness of religious leaders.
With the advent of civilization, religion was usually dominated by priests and kings and used as a way of controlling people. The power structure that provided an advantage of some people over others in a society could also allow one city-state to dominate another. This role of religion continues to this day. At the same time, there has been a parallel lineage of prophets who criticize social norms. In ancient Israel, for example, practically all the prophets were outcasts who lived in huts and caves and were sorely hated by the priests and kings. Governments still use religion as a tool of domination in some countries. In the United States, there are many large religious organizations that obtain a great deal of monetary and other kinds of support from their adherents, and these organizations have great influence on national and local politics. Religion is at least as much a tool of power and fitness opportunities as it was at the time of the Cro-Magnons.
Even though religion is not a single adaptation, its memes are closely enough tied together that they will probably all be with the human species as long as it exists. With a rush of Enlightenment optimism, Thomas Jefferson said in the early 19th century, “There is no young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian.” Evidently he was wrong.
Memes: The Software of Religion
The human brain has a desire to understand and explain things. The above experiences, such as a sense of disembodiment, will create a compulsion to explain them, an empty space just waiting for memes to walk in. One meme told people that there must be something beyond death. Another meme told them that there must be spiritual beings causing everything from the wind to the rising and setting of the sun. Another meme told them that their experiences of disembodiment and the tunnel were actual observations of a spiritual realm. Put these together, and the result is a primordial religion. The only alternative, to a prehistoric person, is to ignore the whole thing. The most successful people were those who figured things out, not those who ignored things. Even if the resulting beliefs were incorrect, so long as they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the believers, natural and sexual selection would favor them.
Human creativity is irrepressible, and it was inevitable that humans would couch their explanations of spiritual experiences in terms of mythological stories that addressed each of the brain phenomena, and that they would develop practices that enhanced the experiences. The stories had gods who made things happen. Religious practices were sometimes accompanied by altered mental states, induced by natural compounds (such as psilocybin in some mushrooms), sensory deprivation (as in a cave), ritual rhythmicity, or particularly vivid dreams. Religion fed on sexual feelings in two ways: adherents experienced sexual feelings both about their deities and about charismatic religious leaders. Religion made humans eager to follow charismatic leaders who claimed to have a connection with the gods. Humans had a desire to understand these overwhelming experiences, and religious memes satisfied this desire.
One of the most important religion memes is guilt. Throughout human prehistory and history, religious leaders have parasitized the human capacity for guilt to reinforce their power over the minds of their followers, and religion has been one of the principal means by which they have done so.
The Evolutionary Advantages of Religion
Religion would probably have been a local aberration in early human populations had it not provided some evolutionary advantage. In modern tribal societies, shamans who claim to have exceptional religious experiences have considerable social power, which can translate into greater resources and reproductive opportunities; no doubt this was also the case during the prehistory of Homo sapiens. David Lewis-Williams points out that this would be the same in the Lascaux cave as in modern charismatic Christianity. Religious leaders would gain the within-population fitness advantage that is necessary for natural selection. Once the trait was established or at least common within a tribe, this tribe would have advantages over tribes that did not possess it—for example, social cohesion and identity that allowed them to prevail in conflicts. Clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would experience a cascade of benefits.
Another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated is the instinct of biophilia. Humans have a natural passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping and roaring inhabitants. To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them. Biophilia, and religious expressions of it, is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in, and has probably helped numerous individuals and tribes to persist through unspeakable hardships.
Although all Homo sapiens groups have religion, there was a striking development of religion when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and later when the most recent ice age forced Northern European tribes southward where they encountered disturbingly intelligent people that already lived in Southern Europe. Religion then functioned in tribal identity. Evidence for the tribal identity function is that there were geographical differences in types and styles of artwork—for example, different caves specialized on different animals, reflecting differences in established traditions.
There have been many different attempted explanations of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Some anthropologists say that the paintings were sympathetic magic to promote successful hunting. However, as David Lewis-Williams points out, the set of animals in the paintings is not the same as the animals that the people ate (for example, they did not eat bears and lions), and only 15 percent of the paintings show animals with spears. The paintings resemble animal visions that people might have seen during hallucinations. The animal paintings are often accompanied by geometric symbols that resemble the images seen during migraines. The animal images are not in their natural habitats, and appear to be floating, and sometimes lack hooves.
To the Cro-Magnon, as to many recent tribal peoples, the wall of a cave may have represented an interface between the outer world and the underworld. When the prehistoric people entered a cave, they were literally entering the underworld. In the darkness they would hallucinate from sensory deprivation, and possibly also from the high levels of carbon dioxide. Then when the lamps were lit, they would paint the images they had seen. Sometimes the artists would also paint their hands, leaving either positive or negative images of them, as a mark of direct contact with the underworld. Hand contact with the wall, and the process of spit-painting, were part of the overall religious experience. The visionary quality of the paintings is particularly evident in the deepest recesses of the caves, some as much as a kilometer underground, where quick sketches of many animals overlapped.
In addition to the individual religious experience, there was also a communal aspect. Religious shamans could gain admiration from their followers by taking them deep into the caves to see the evidence of their religious experiences. Meanwhile, the shallower reaches of the cave served as the assembly rooms for the general population, and it is in such places that the large, vivid images are found. The cave paintings may therefore have served to increase the social status and the fitness of religious leaders.
With the advent of civilization, religion was usually dominated by priests and kings and used as a way of controlling people. The power structure that provided an advantage of some people over others in a society could also allow one city-state to dominate another. This role of religion continues to this day. At the same time, there has been a parallel lineage of prophets who criticize social norms. In ancient Israel, for example, practically all the prophets were outcasts who lived in huts and caves and were sorely hated by the priests and kings. Governments still use religion as a tool of domination in some countries. In the United States, there are many large religious organizations that obtain a great deal of monetary and other kinds of support from their adherents, and these organizations have great influence on national and local politics. Religion is at least as much a tool of power and fitness opportunities as it was at the time of the Cro-Magnons.
Even though religion is not a single adaptation, its memes are closely enough tied together that they will probably all be with the human species as long as it exists. With a rush of Enlightenment optimism, Thomas Jefferson said in the early 19th century, “There is no young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian.” Evidently he was wrong.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Evolution of religion, part one.
The following entries are from the Revised Edition of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, which will be published online by Facts on File in 2012. I have taken them from the entry, “religion, evolution of.”
Homo sapiens is a religious species. This is one of the few behavioral universals of the human species. Though there is individual variation in the strength of this trait, no society is without it; those that tried to eliminate it have failed. Religion appears to be ineradicable. There is clearly no biological basis for particular religions, but it is likely that there is a biological basis for the capacity for religion.
Neandertals apparently did not have religion. The contrast between the religious artifacts of Homo sapiens and their absence in Homo neanderthalensis in their regions of overlap could hardly be greater. While Homo sapiens had intricate burials (a burial of two children in Sungir, Russia, contained 10,000 shell beads each of which took from one to three person hours to prepare), Neandertals apparently dug the shallowest possible graves to keep the body from stinking. The Shanidar burial of a Neandertal with flowers, even if it is confirmed, is a rare and isolated instance. Neandertal pendants associated with the Châtelperronian culture have been mostly dismissed as imitative of the Aurignacian culture of the Cro-Magnon, and even if they were not, their connection with religion is unclear. Neandertal caves totally lack the wall art that abundantly and resplendently represents Cro-Magnon religious experience. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams calls Neandertals “congenital atheists.” Yet Neandertals had brains at least as large as those of modern humans. Other groups of H. sapiens, all over the world, had a similar abundance of religious practice.
What is Religion?
Religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. Many scientists have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. Therefore when scientists say that religion is universal among humans, they mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. They cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. Social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others.
The Brain: The Hardware of Religion
Human brains increased in size over evolutionary time for numerous reasons, including the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it the evolution of intelligence. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size, including the parts associated with the following capacities:
• Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can create a feeling of transcendence (ex- means out of, stasis means place).
• Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. The sensation of having a defined body is something that the brain creates. Some kinds of strokes cause their victims to experience reality as a stream of sensations, without an awareness of embodiment. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.
• Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, and one for which religion clearly provides an outlet. One of the principal components of altruism is guilt, which reinforces the likelihood that people will act altruistically.
• The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this may be a vestige of a child’s worship of parents.
• Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that he or she will die, and the possibility that he or she will be preoccupied by it.
• Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them.
Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. Specific areas and functions of the brain have been implicated in the mystical, religious experience. Neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have been particularly active in researching the brain activities associated with religion. They point out, for example, that when humans enter an altered state of consciousness, the orientation association area of the brain (which in the left lobe is associated with the sensation of having a limited body, and in the right lobe with the sense of space that a person occupies) contribute to out-of-body experiences.
Religion is not pathological, but brain pathologies can help scientists to understand its neurological basis. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe by electrodes (or pathological stimulation by epilepsy) produces experiences closely paralleling the near-death experience of passing through a tunnel towards the light. Similar effects are also produced by the drug ketamine.
Announcement: On my other blog I begin an October series about the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. On my YouTube channel, Darwin visits these dinosaur footprints.
Homo sapiens is a religious species. This is one of the few behavioral universals of the human species. Though there is individual variation in the strength of this trait, no society is without it; those that tried to eliminate it have failed. Religion appears to be ineradicable. There is clearly no biological basis for particular religions, but it is likely that there is a biological basis for the capacity for religion.
Neandertals apparently did not have religion. The contrast between the religious artifacts of Homo sapiens and their absence in Homo neanderthalensis in their regions of overlap could hardly be greater. While Homo sapiens had intricate burials (a burial of two children in Sungir, Russia, contained 10,000 shell beads each of which took from one to three person hours to prepare), Neandertals apparently dug the shallowest possible graves to keep the body from stinking. The Shanidar burial of a Neandertal with flowers, even if it is confirmed, is a rare and isolated instance. Neandertal pendants associated with the Châtelperronian culture have been mostly dismissed as imitative of the Aurignacian culture of the Cro-Magnon, and even if they were not, their connection with religion is unclear. Neandertal caves totally lack the wall art that abundantly and resplendently represents Cro-Magnon religious experience. Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams calls Neandertals “congenital atheists.” Yet Neandertals had brains at least as large as those of modern humans. Other groups of H. sapiens, all over the world, had a similar abundance of religious practice.
What is Religion?
Religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. Many scientists have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. Therefore when scientists say that religion is universal among humans, they mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. They cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. Social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others.
The Brain: The Hardware of Religion
Human brains increased in size over evolutionary time for numerous reasons, including the mastery of technology, sexual selection, and social interactions. Religion probably had nothing at all to do with it the evolution of intelligence. But as the brain increased in size, it was not just the parts of the brain that conferred social and technological skills that increased; the whole brain increased in size, including the parts associated with the following capacities:
• Sexual ecstasy. Humans have a highly-developed capacity to experience sexual ecstasy. Religion, like orgasm, can create a feeling of transcendence (ex- means out of, stasis means place).
• Loss of the awareness of having a defined body. The sensation of having a defined body is something that the brain creates. Some kinds of strokes cause their victims to experience reality as a stream of sensations, without an awareness of embodiment. In ancient times, some people may have experienced head traumas, oxygen deprivation, starvation, or dehydration, which opened them up to a disembodied sensation, or they may have induced these feelings by meditation. This is one of the elements of religious experience, commonly reported by people who have a well-developed ability to meditate.
• Altruism. Altruism is one of the most pervasive human characteristics, and one for which religion clearly provides an outlet. One of the principal components of altruism is guilt, which reinforces the likelihood that people will act altruistically.
• The need for an authority figure. Humans appear to have a psychological need for an authority figure whose goodness they do not question. In adults, this may be a vestige of a child’s worship of parents.
• Awareness of death. Natural selection favored the evolution of intelligence, and one of the side-effects of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that he or she will die, and the possibility that he or she will be preoccupied by it.
• Agency. Very young children do not display feelings or awareness that can easily be described as religion. They do, however, always have the capacity for agency attribution. When something happens, they think that someone has caused it to happen. The wind blows because someone makes the wind blow. If they experience pain, it is because someone is hurting them.
Religion makes use of all of these brain elements. Specific areas and functions of the brain have been implicated in the mystical, religious experience. Neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have been particularly active in researching the brain activities associated with religion. They point out, for example, that when humans enter an altered state of consciousness, the orientation association area of the brain (which in the left lobe is associated with the sensation of having a limited body, and in the right lobe with the sense of space that a person occupies) contribute to out-of-body experiences.
Religion is not pathological, but brain pathologies can help scientists to understand its neurological basis. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe by electrodes (or pathological stimulation by epilepsy) produces experiences closely paralleling the near-death experience of passing through a tunnel towards the light. Similar effects are also produced by the drug ketamine.
Announcement: On my other blog I begin an October series about the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. On my YouTube channel, Darwin visits these dinosaur footprints.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Agnosticism, then what?
I’ve pretty much determined that agnosticism is the only reasonable conclusion I can make to the big questions of life. And yet, there are many times in our lives when we cannot not decide. We have to make at least a provisional decision.
The first is, how do you live, given the uncertainty?
The second is, what do you believe when you die?
For me, the answer to both is based in Jesus of Nazareth. The man, not the icon of doctrine that churches have created about him. I will live in such a manner in which I pursue, however imperfectly, those things that Jesus considered to be important: love of God (however vaguely I understand God) and love of humankind. Jesus also loved the Earth, upon which all humans (the poorest most directly) depend. And, at the moment of death, I will still not know whether there is something that will come afterward, or if Jesus is actually alive in some way, but if there is anyone in that afterlife, I believe it will be Jesus.
The uncertainty of my statements will not satisfy fundamentalists or even mainstream Christians. Certainly fundamentalists will call down the seals, trumpets, and plagues of Revelation upon my head. But if Jesus still exists and is waiting for us, I believe he will be happy with my sentiments. Not the Jesus on a white horse in Revelation trampling the grapes of wrath and beating the nations into a sorry pulp, but the Jesus who wandered on the hillsides of Judaea.
The first is, how do you live, given the uncertainty?
The second is, what do you believe when you die?
For me, the answer to both is based in Jesus of Nazareth. The man, not the icon of doctrine that churches have created about him. I will live in such a manner in which I pursue, however imperfectly, those things that Jesus considered to be important: love of God (however vaguely I understand God) and love of humankind. Jesus also loved the Earth, upon which all humans (the poorest most directly) depend. And, at the moment of death, I will still not know whether there is something that will come afterward, or if Jesus is actually alive in some way, but if there is anyone in that afterlife, I believe it will be Jesus.
The uncertainty of my statements will not satisfy fundamentalists or even mainstream Christians. Certainly fundamentalists will call down the seals, trumpets, and plagues of Revelation upon my head. But if Jesus still exists and is waiting for us, I believe he will be happy with my sentiments. Not the Jesus on a white horse in Revelation trampling the grapes of wrath and beating the nations into a sorry pulp, but the Jesus who wandered on the hillsides of Judaea.
Friday, September 23, 2011
On John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies
I recently read John Updike’s 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. The late John Updike was one of the most empathetic writers who ever lived, at least as empathetic as Anton Chekhov. In this novel, Updike traces four generations of the Wilmot family: from a minister to a mail carrier to an actress to a religious cult member. Updike got inside the minds of these fictitious people, just the way he got inside the mind of a fictitious young Muslim in his novel Terrorist. What a diversity of people Updike could understand, and explain to us! In the Beauty of the Lilies was obviously inspired by the Branch Davidian event of 1993 just as Terrorist was inspired by the September 11 attacks.
Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:
The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.
I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.
A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”
So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”
Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.
I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.
The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.
Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:
The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.
I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.
A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”
So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”
Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.
I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.
The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Christianity and the Environment, part 3
We considered, in two preceding blog entries, how conservative Christianity has defined the nonhuman world as creation and therefore as something expendable by humans. Other religious traditions consider the Earth to be nature, from which humans evolved and of which humans are a part, just like every other species. Some of these religions are polytheistic, such as Buddhism and paganism, while others are more akin to spiritual philosophies, such as Taoism. There is even a little of this viewpoint in the Bible. The 104th psalm describes a world of creatures, of which humans are depicted as merely one component. Although these religions have not led their adherents on a deliberate conquest of the Earth, the homelands of these religions have suffered their share of environmental problems. The natives of North and South America experienced collapsed civilizations just like the Europeans.
The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.
Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.
Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.
The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.
Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.
Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.
The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
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