God

The real source of the evolution debate, part 2

PNRJ Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As I discussed in my last post, the propositions that people really object to are not evolution per se. They are distinct but conceptually related ideas, such as adaptationism, common descent, animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

In my last post I dealt with adaptationism and common descent; now its time for animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

Animalism

Next we must consider animalism, the proposition that humans are not “special”, that we are animals like any other. I’d like to distinguish two forms of animalism which are quite different but often confused; I will call them weak animalism and strong animalism. The former is definitely true, but the latter doesn’t make any sense. Weak animalism is the observation that human beings have the same biological structure as other animals, and share a common ancestry and many common traits—in short, that humans are in fact animals. We are all born, we all die; we all breathe, we all eat, we all sleep; we all love, we all suffer. This seems to me a completely unassailable observation; of course these things are true, they are essential to human nature, and they are a direct consequence of our kinship with the rest of the animal domain. Humans are not rocks or plants or empty space; humans are animals.

On the other hand, strong animalism is the claim that because humans are animals, we may (or should) “act like animals”, stealing, raping, murdering, and so on. It is true that all these behaviors, or very close analogues, can be observed in the animal domain; but at the same time, so can friendship (e.g. in chimpanzees), affection (e.g. in penguins), monogamy (e.g. in gerbils), and many other behaviors. The diversity of behaviors in the animal domain is mind-bogglingly huge. There are animals that can sever and regrow limbs and animals that can infest and control other animals’ minds.

In the only sense in which we are “just animals”, the fact justifies no moral claims about our behavior. This matter is not a trivial quibble, but a major factor in the evolution debate: Intelligent Design proponents made a similar complaint when they objected to Bloodhound Gang’s song “The Bad Touch” which includes the line, “You and me baby we ain’t nothin’ but mammals // So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”. This may make for entertaining music (and I’ve no objection to sex or even promiscuity and seduction per se), but it is highly fallacious reasoning, and it’s clearly hurting the public understanding of science. If you insist on saying that humans are “just animals”, you should be very clear about what this means; I much prefer to remove the condescending “just” and say “humans are animals”. For to say humans are just animals would be like saying the Earth is just a planet, or love is just a chemical reaction. If all you mean is that the example is an instance of a category, you don’t need the “just”; by saying “just”, you clearly are trying to assert some sort of equivalence between members of the category, one that would deflate the status of the particular example. Yet if you have to say it, it probably isn’t true; no one would point at a random rock and say “this is just a rock”—instead you point to the Earth and say “this is just a rock”, when in fact it is a very special rock. Humans are a very special animals, the Earth is a very special planet, and love is a very special chemical reaction (closely tied to that most mysterious of chemical reactions, consciousness). We are members of one vast animal family—indeed, one vast family of life—but we are most definitely the wisest and most powerful member.

I’m honestly not sure what I would do if I tried to “act like an animal”; I suppose I would be born, breathe, eat, sleep, love, suffer and die—but I was going to do these things anyway, whether I wanted to or not. Indeed, by weak animalism, humans are animals, and so by acting like human beings we are in fact acting like animals—the animal Homo sapiens.

Abiogenesis

Next comes abiogenesis, the proposition that living things came from nonliving things. Well, where else would they come from? The only way to deny this proposition is to say that living things always existed. (If God made life, he would have done so by being a living thing that always existed.) The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t really explain where life comes from, it only pushes its origin back into the infinite past. Scientists are making progress in using nonliving chemicals to produce replicating entities that are very similar to life, and inn 2010 scientists created the first all-synthetic bacterium, but to do it they had to use pre-existing bacteria to set up the reactions. This lends credibility to the idea that life came from nonlife, but in fact even this wouldn’t conclusively demonstrate abiogenesis; it would prove that life can arise from nonlife, but that doesn’t mean it did originally. The truth is, we really don’t understand much about the origin of life, and even less about the origin of the universe; but this does nothing to undermine evolution or even common descent. No one doubts the existence of gravity simply because we don’t know what caused the Big Bang!

Atheism

Finally, and most controversially, there is atheism. Theism is belief in a superhuman being that responds to prayers and performs miracles; atheism is the negation of theism. This is all atheism means; if you think it means something more than this—absolute knowledge that there cannot be a creator being, or no ultimate foundation for morality, or no meaning to existence, or whatever else—that isn’t atheism. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a personal divinity, someone who says that there are no superhuman beings that intervene in our lives. This is a fairly strong claim in itself, since if correct, atheism implies that religion as we know it—prayer, rituals, miracles, holy books—is utterly false. Deep philosophical religion, like that practiced by Einstein or Kant, remains intact; but the religion of churches, mosques and temples is completely undermined.

Evolution doesn’t imply atheism, but it does support it, in the following sense: Evolution answers the question of “Where did we come from?” without requiring God. Even before we knew about evolution, religion wasn’t a very convincing answer to that question; but we didn’t really have a better one—and now we do.

Yet atheism is clearly correct. This is something we can infer directly from a large body of scientific evidence. I’ve already addressed this topic in previous posts, so I’ll be brief this time around.

Maybe there is a kind of religion that could be reconciled with science; but it’s not a theistic religion. Perhaps there is a God who made the whole of the universe, set it running in perfect harmony to achieve some divine plan. This is called deism, and it’s a scientifically respectable position. But then, it is senseless to pray, since God isn’t going to change the divine plan on behalf of tiny creatures on a backwater planet of a backwater star in a backwater galaxy. It is plainly wrong to call such a being “he” or even “He”, since no being so vast and powerful could ever be properly described in the petty terms of a biological male—it would be like saying that gravity has testicles, energy conservation has a beard, or causality has a Y chromosome. I’m not sure we can even fairly say that God is a conscious being, for consciousness as we know it seems too vulgar a trait to assign to an entity of such vastness. In fact, the theologian Paul Tillich thought even existence a concept insufficient to describe the divine. It is foolish to look to ancient books to understand God, for its work is written from horizon to horizon in the fabric of the universe, and these ancient books are but pale shadows of its grandeur. It is naive to suppose that we are special beings created in God’s image, for God has made many millions of species on this planet, and probably countless more on other distant planets; furthermore, God’s process of production favors insects and bacteria and requires massive systematic death and suffering.

And even once we have removed everything we knew of religion, even this truncated theology suffers from an egregious flaw: Such a creator offers us no evidence of its existence. A deistic God is indistinguishable from the universe itself, definitely in practice and perhaps even in principle. I don’t really see the point in using the word “God” when the word “nature” captures what we mean much better. Saying “God is vaster than we can imagine, and of course by `God’ I mean the universe” strikes me as like saying “The Sun is powered by magical unicorn love, and of course by `magical unicorn love’ I mean nuclear fusion.”

And theism, religion as we know it, is philosophically and scientifically bankrupt. Imagine an airline pilot who lets go of the controls and prays to God to fly the plane; imagine a surgeon who puts down the scalpel and prays to God for the patients to be healed. That’s the sort of thing we would do if theism were true. It would make sense to do these things—it would be rational to do these things—under the presumption that there is a God who answers our prayers. You can’t escape this; if it makes sense to pray for your sick grandmother, then it doesn’t make sense for her to take medicine—because if God is in control, then chemistry isn’t. The fact that hardly anyone really would resort to prayer when an obvious and effective scientific alternative is available (and the fact that people who do are considered fanatical or even insane) clearly shows that theism is bankrupt, and that hardly anyone believes it confidently enough to actually live by it. No one except the craziest fanatics believes in God the way they believe in gravity.

I’m sure this book will be perceived as yet another “angry atheist” “attacking” “religious people”; on the contrary, I am a respectful and reflective atheist criticizing theistic religion. I respect religious people; I do not respect theistic religion. Indeed, I respect religious people too much to let them go on believing such ridiculous things. What glorious powers of human reason are wasted on such nonsense! If you believe in the subtle, abstract, inscrutable God of Einstein or Spinoza, very well. We disagree only about the most abstract matters, almost at the level of semantics (what you call “God” I prefer to call “nature”). Our beliefs and values are not only reconcilable but nearly identical.

On the other hand if you believe in a magical personal God, a God who writes books and answers prayers, then my criticism is indeed directed at your beliefs; I think you are mistaken, gravely, dangerously mistaken.

Atheism is a scientific fact.

Conclusion

Evolution is a fact. The Modern Synthesis of genetics and natural selection is among the most certain scientific theories ever devised; it is the unified field theory of life on Earth. The following claims may be controversial in our society, but they are also scientific facts: Living things are adapted to their environment by natural selection; all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor; humans are animals; life arose by natural processes; and theistic religion is false. You can accept these facts, or else you can live in denial.

Yes, in principle evolution is a theory that can be doubted, but in principle everything in science is a theory that can be doubted. If you want certain, undeniable truths, you will need to stay with logic and mathematics—and even then, you’ll need to be careful about your axioms. Otherwise, you must always be open to a thin sliver of uncertainty, a sliver that should be no larger for evolution than for gravity or photosynthesis. (Of the three, gravity is by far the least-understood.)

The convergence of scientific evidence in favor of evolution, a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, genetics, natural selection, common descent, adaptationism, weak animalism, and yes, even atheism, is so incredibly massive that we’d have to give up half of science to abandon these things. Any revisions we do make in the future will necessarily be minor, leaving the core of truth intact.

To doubt that rubidium decays into strontium at the same rate now it did a million years ago, you must explain how the fundamental laws of nuclear physics that we have verified to twelve decimal places are incorrect.

To doubt that cetaceans evolved from land mammals, you must explain why they breathe air instead of water and swim vertically rather than horizontally, unlike nearly everything else in the sea.

To believe in microevolution but not macroevolution, you must think that there is some mysterious force that prevents what has happened 100 times from happening an additional 100,000 times for the same reasons—for, if repeated many times, a 0.01% systematic change per century, a darwin of evolution (lowercase for a unit of measure, like the newton of force or the weber of magnetic flux), is more than enough to account for the transition from archaea to eukaryotes over 3 billion years, and vastly more than is needed to account for the transition from apes to humans over 5 million years. In fact, observed rates of evolution in the short term have reached the level of kilodarwins, thousands of darwins.

To doubt that life on Earth has changed and diverged over time you must ignore the most obvious facts about a remarkably rich and well-organized fossil record. There are no rabbits in Precambrian layers. There are no trilobites in Mesozoic layers. There are no primates in the Jurassic, and no sauropods in the Tertiary. There have never been a human fossil and a dinosaur fossil found in the same rock. Creationists like to claim that the fossil record sorted itself by size and lifestyle (as here), but in fact there are large and small, land and sea, in pretty much every layer of the fossil record—just not the same ones, because the organisms in lower layers died off and were replaced by the organisms in higher layers. Pterodactyls look a lot like a birds, come in roughly the same size ranges as birds, and seemed to live similar lifestyles, but you’ll never find the two buried together. Looking at the fossils, you can’t help but infer evolution; if God made the fossils, he must have wanted us to believe in evolution.

What is Religion?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Nov 3 JDN 2460618

In this and following posts I will be extensively criticizing religion and religious accounts of morality. Religious authorities have asserted a monopoly for themselves on moral knowledge; as a result most people seem to agree with statements like Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The majority of people around the world—including the United States, but not including most other First World countries—believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Yet little could be further from the truth.

First, I must deal with the fact that in American culture, it is widely considered taboo to criticize religion. A level of criticism which would be unremarkable in other fields of discourse is viewed as “shrill”, “arrogant”, “strident”, “harsh”, and “offensive”.

For instance, I believe the following:

The Republican Party is overall harmful.

Most of Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is clearly false.

Did you find that offensive? I presume not! I’m sure many people would disagree with me on these things, but hardly anyone would seriously argue that I am being aggressive or intentionally provocative.

Indeed, if I chose less controversial examples, people would find my words positively charitable:

The Nazi Party is overall harmful.

Most of Mao Tse Tung’s The Little Red Book is clearly false.

Now, compare some other beliefs I have, also about ideologies and books:

Islam is overall harmful.

Most of the Bible is clearly false.

Suddenly, I’m being “strident”; I’m being an “angry atheist”, “intolerant” of religious believers—yet I’m using the same words! I must conclude that the objection of atheist “intolerance” comes not because my criticisms are genuinely harsh, but simply because they are criticisms of religion. We have been taught that criticizing religion is evil, regardless of whether the criticisms are valid. Once beliefs are wrapped in the shield of “religion”, they become invulnerable.

If I’d said that Muslim people are inherently evil, or that people who believe in the Bible are mentally defective, I can see why people would be offended. But I’m not saying that. On the contrary, I think the vast majority of religious people are good, reasonable, well-intentioned people who are honestly mistaken. There are some extremely intelligent theists in the world, and I do not dismiss their intelligence; I merely contend that they are mistaken about this issue. I don’t think religious people are evil or stupid or crazy; I just think they are wrong. I respect religious people as intelligent beings; that’s why I am trying to use reason to persuade them. I wouldn’t try to reason with a rock or even a tiger.

I will in future posts show that religion is false and morally harmful. But of course in order to do that, I must first explain what I mean by religion; while we use the word every day, we are far from consistent about what we mean.

There’s one meaning of “religion” that often is put forth by its defenders, on which “religion” seems to mean only “moral values”, or else “a sense of mystery and awe before the universe”. Einstein often spoke this way, which is why people who quote him out of context often get the impression that he is defending Judaism or Christianity:

I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

But in the original context, a very different picture emerges:

Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Here, “religion” comes to mean little more than “moral values” or “aspiration toward truth”. In my own lexicon Einstein’s words would become “Fact without value is lame; value without fact is blind.” (I would add: both are the domain of science.)

Einstein did not believe in a personal deity of any kind. He was moved to awe by the mystery and grandeur of the universe, and motivated by moral duties to do good and seek truth. If that’s what you mean by “religion”, then of course I am entirely in favor of it. But that is not what most people mean by “religion”.

A much better meaning of the word “religion” is something like “cultural community of believers”; this is what we mean when we say that Catholicism is a religion or that Shi’a Islam is a religion. This is essentially the definition I will be using. But there is a problem with this meaning, because it doesn’t specify what constitutes a believer.

May any shared belief suffice? Then the Democratic Party is a “religion”, because it is a community of people with shared beliefs. Indeed, the scientific community is a “religion”. This sort of definition is so broad that it loses all usefulness.

So in order for “religion” to be a really meaningful concept, we must specify just what sort of beliefs qualify as religious rather than secular. Here I offer my definition; I have tried to be as charitable to religion as possible while remaining accurate in what I am criticizing.

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that is based upon one or more of the following concepts:

  • Super-human beings: sentient beings that are much more powerful and long-lived than humans are.
  • Afterlife: a continued existence for human conscious experience that persists after death.
  • Prayer: a system of ritual behaviors that are expected to influence the outcome of phenomena through the mediation of something other than human action or laws of nature.

Note that I have specifically excluded from the definition claims that the super-human beings are “supernatural” or “magical”. Though many people, even religious people, would include these concepts, I do not, because I don’t think that the words supernatural and magical carry any well-defined meaning. Is “supernatural” what doesn’t follow the laws of nature? Well, do we mean the laws as we know them, or the laws as they are? It makes a big difference: The laws of nature as we know them have changed as science advances. 100 years ago, atoms were beyond our understanding; 200 years ago, electricity was beyond our understanding; 500 years ago, ballistics was beyond our understanding as well. The laws of nature as they are, on the other hand, are by definition the laws that everything in the universe must follow—hence, “supernatural” would be a funny way of saying “non-existent”.

I think ultimately “supernatural” and “magical” are just weird ways of saying “what I don’t understand”; but if that’s all they are, they clearly aren’t helpful. Today’s magic is tomorrow’s science. If Clarke’s Third Law is right that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then what’s the point of being magic? It’s just technology we don’t understand! In fact I prefer the reformulation of Clarke’s Law by Mark Stanley: Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it. To an ape, a spear is magical; to a hunter-gatherer, a rifle is magical; and to us today, creating planets from dust and living a million years are magical. But that could very well change someday.

Similarly, I have excluded the hyperboles “omnipotent” and “omniscient”, because they are widely considered by philosophers to be outright incoherent, and in no cases are they actually believed. If you believed that God knows everything, then you would have to believe that God knows how to prove the statement “This statement is unprovable” (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), and that God knows everything he doesn’t know. If you believed that God could do anything, you would have to believe that God can put four sides on a triangle, that God can heal the sick while leaving them sick, and that God can make a rock so big he can’t lift it. Even if you restrict God’s powers to what is logically coherent, you are still left trying to explain why he didn’t create a world of perfect happiness and peace to begin with, or how he can know the future if there is any randomness in the world at all. Furthermore, my definition is meant to include beings like Zeus and Thor, which were sincerely believed to be divine by millions of people for hundreds of years. Zeus is clearly neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but he is a lot more powerful and long-lived than we are; he’s not very benevolent, but nonetheless people called him God. (In fact, the Latin word for God, deus and the proper name Zeus are linguistically cognate. Zeus was thought to define or epitomize what it means to be God.) My definition is also meant to include non-divine super-humans like spirits and leprechauns, which similarly have been believed by many people for many centuries. The definition I have used is about as broad as I could make it without including things that obviously and uncontroversially exist, like “sentient beings other than humans” (animals?) or “forces beyond human power and comprehension” (gravity?) or “energy that animates life and permeates all things” (electricity?).

I have also excluded from my definition of “religion” anything that is obviously false or bad, like “believing things with no evidence”, “denying scientific facts”, “assenting to logical contradictions”, “hating those who disagree with them”, or “blaming natural disasters on people’s moral failings”. In fact, these are characteristic features of nearly all religions, and most religious people do them often; recall that 40% of Americans think that human beings were created by God less than 10,000 years ago, and note also that while the number has fallen over the decades, still 40% would not elect an atheist President, despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Science is atheist or agnostic. In the US, 32% of people believe in ghosts and 21% believe in witches. Views like “When people die they become ghosts”, “evolution is a lie” and “Earthquakes are caused by sexual immorality” are really quite mainstream in modern society. But criticism of religion is always countered by claims that we “New Atheists” (we are certainly not new, for Seneca and Epicurus would have qualified) lack philosophical sophistication, or focus too much on the obviously bad or ridiculous ideas.

Furthermore, note that I have formulated the definition of religion as a disjunction, not a conjunction; you must have at least one of these features, but need not have all of them. This is so that I can include in my criticism beliefs like Buddhism, which often does not involve prayer or super-human beings, but except in its most rarefied forms (which really aren’t recognizably religious!) invariably involves concepts of afterlife, and also New Age beliefs, which often do not involve afterlife or super-human beings but fit my definition of prayer—wearing a rabbit’s foot is a prayer, as is using a Ouiji board. It is incumbent upon me to show that all three are false, not merely that one of them is false. Of course, if you believe all three, then even if I only succeed in discrediting any of them, that is enough to show you are mistaken.

Finally, note that what I have just defined is a philosophy that, at least in principle, could be true. We can imagine a world in which there are super-human beings who control our fates; we can imagine a world in which consciousness persists after death; we can imagine a world where entreating to such super-human beings is a good way to get things done. On this definition, religion isn’t incoherent, it’s just incorrect. My point is not that these things are impossible—it is that they are not true.

And that is precisely what I intend to show in upcoming posts.