Slate.com book excerpt

Previously, Slate has run several interesting features on religion, such as a very engaging "Blogging the Bible" recurring column in which a modern reader offers his impressions after actually reading the book so many claim as indisputable cannon. Recently, the website posted a excerpt from Christopher Hitchens's new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens makes some very powerful points, and I'm sure that even many believers will agree with him, provided they are talking about all the other religions, not the specific one they personally maintain to be absolute truth.

Demystifying Love

Empiricists often hear objections to the effect that "science provides a reasonably good description of most phenomena, but there are just some things, such as god, or love, or human consciousness, that simply transcend any attempt to be explained by any purely materialistic theory. These critiques can usually be recognized as simple reformulations of the "god of the gaps" philosophy ("since I can't explain it right now, it must be the work of a god or gods or some other unexplainable source"). By simply giving up it , the objector is ignoring the track record empiricism has had against the god of the gaps (eg. lighting is not really a projectile from Zeus). Science is constantly making headway on questions formerly considered to be completely intractable. This is not to say that scientists will ever have all the answers - it may turn out that some things are really beyond human comprehension, but don't count on it. Therefore, upon being called a "materialist," one can rejoin, "you say it like it's a bad thing!"

One area in particular that has long been thought to be the Provence of the transcendent is romantic love. Ironically, it is on this topic that evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists have made huge progress, showing how "love" can be explained as an vital evolutionary adaptation. In fact, The New York Times "themed" this Tuesday's Science Times with the science of "desire." Some traditionalists might be unhappy to hear that the "transcendent" romantic attraction between sweethearts is really nothing more than a matter of neurotransmitters acting in very down-to-earth biochemical reactions, however, reality is not always so accommodating to our wishes. Richard Dawkins likes to say, science and religion try to answer the same questions. Science has the added benefit of usually being right. Besides, explaining our world doesn't make it less interesting by "ruining the mystery." On the contrary, science has shown that the universe is so much more facinating than humans could ever had imagined. As Daniel Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, knowing that the sun is a huge thermonuclear furnace teeming with atoms in ceaseless activity is a lot more interesting than thinking it to be pulled across the sky by a chariot.
So instead of taking all of the excitement out of life, empiricism helps inspire a sense of awe that a pile of molecules we call a human being could love and think and have a sense of awe in the first place.

"Theistic Evolution"

I attended a lecture recently on evolution by an ordained rabbi who also happens to be a university biology professor. He maintained that the empirical evidence in favor of the scientific consensus regarding evolution and the age of the universe is overwhelming, but argued very passionately that, far from being a challenge to traditional Judaism, modern science can be seen to fit well with the classical Biblical commentaries of the Talmudic and Medieval eras. He showed how mainstream Judaism has never taken a literal view when reading Genesis and severally criticized the fundamentalist Christians (and more recently, ultra-orthodox rabbis) who reject evolution outright. I found his talk to be refreshing but not necessarily novel. I remember that when I was growing up the vast majority of my teachers and peers each came up with some scheme within his or her own mind to reconcile religious faith with science, since they held both to be correct. I found that in practice, this meant that there was not a great deal of difference in how they approached the natural world compared to atheists, except that they would think "look how marvelous God made the world to be," instead of "look how marvelous geological forces and natural selection have made the world to be." Believers in this kind of "theistic evolution," which holds that God directed natural forces as a means to create human life, can (and do) become successful Biologists and Biomedical researchers. This is in stark contrast to fundamentalists who feel that they have to reject huge swaths of science (cosmology, geology, biology, physics, astronomy, paleontology...) in order to justify a literal understanding of a ancient book. I strongly doubt that such a person could really participate in real research without a huge amount of mental compartmentalization and/or cognitive dissonance.

However, I am not so thrilled by theistic evolution either, even though I used to be a strong believer in it for many years. It is really a compromise, a forced syncrotism for the times when one wants so badly for one's dearly held religious beliefs to be in sync with empirical observations . So while I commend believers who possess the intellectual honesty to say that the evidence backing evolution and the age of the universe is convincing, I wish that they could just take that one further step and see how having a deity is no longer a necessary component. However, I know from experience that there is a huge emotional gap between believing in theistic evolution (and therefore being about to go on with one's regular religious beliefs and practices) compared to taking that final step and becoming an atheist.

On a related note, I've also found a rather lengthy but very well researched letter from a religious Jew which articulates a litany of logical difficulties inherent in belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and Talmud. I've always been especially disturbed by apologists who try to justify statements in the Talmud about spontaneous generation, folk remedies, or astronomy etc. that are currently known to be wrong by saying that "the sages were right then, but now nature has changed." I feel that to claim that, for example, lice really did come grow out of the dirt two thousand of years ago (as was believed by the Greeks) but nature suddenly changed between then and now so that they reproduce sexually just because an text taken to be "received wisdom" says so shows how strongly critical thinking is being suppressed. This is especially ironic considering that the Talmud itself is basically one long exercise in critically analyzing rabbinic dicta.

Happy Darwin Day!

Today, Feb 12, has been designated "Darwin Day" in recognition of the 198 Birthday of Charles Darwin. This holiday gives us a opportunity not only to reflect on the development of the theory of evolution, which is, in my humble opinion, among the top three ideas in all of science. [As a physicist, I would have to put quantum mechanics, and possibly special relativity first, but I do spend most of my spare time thinking about Evolutionary Psychology, as I hope to detail in some future posts.] Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of evolution to modern Biology. It is literally the linchpin of all descriptions of life. See, for example, the classic essay by Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."

However, as momentous as this occurrence is, we should also realize why celebrations of scientific personalities is so rare. Contrary to what some Creationists have alleged, Evolution is not some "received wisdom" venerated like some anti-religious doctrine. And it goes without saying that Darwin is not looked on as an inerrant prophet whose ideas are mindless accepted as dogma. Scientists accept evolution because of its immense predictive power as well as the huge amount of fossil, molecular, anatomical, and genetic evidence in its favor. Like all theories, evolution has changed many times as new evidence is discovered and better explanations are formulated. As scientists, we do our best not to become overly emotionally attached to any theory, and to accept or reject them based on their merits. While it may seem a little disappointing that, unlike most religious believers, scientists cannot point to an idea and claim that it is the absolute and immutable truth, most of the ideas that form the foundation of modern science, like evolution, are so well founded by observations that, while constantly subject to improvement, are extremely unlikely to ever be completely overturned. This is why the theories, as opposed to the people, usually get most of the attention. But in the current debate over evolution, it is often valuable to have a symbolic figure to point to. So Happy Birthday, Darwin!

Pictures

Penn Jillette from Penn & Teller is one of the most visible atheists in popular culture. He does an excellent job injecting a bit of skepticism into our daily lives via their TV show. He has also contributed a very good Essay in the NPR "This I Believe" Series. I've put his picture on the sidebar as the first of what I hope will be many famous free-thinkers, a designation that is not so trivial given that the overwhelming percentage of the world population claims belief in a deity of some sort.

The Necessity of Atheism

Like all great poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a knack for expressing a lot of information in a few words:

"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?"

-From The Necessity of Atheism by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think, if I may presume to give an answer, that the reason religion is filled with all these contradictions between the doctrine of a deity's omnipotence and omnipresence with its actual practices is that we humans have a irrepressible need to anthropomorphize. Witness our tendency to portray animals as human-like characters in stories and our eagerness to assign human traits to our favorite pets. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes complete sense that the humans that are most likely to survive are the ones who can identify other humans as rational beings like themselves and act accordingly. This "social consciousness," which includes actions like praising, bargaining with, and asking favors or forgiveness from others is a vital part of human interaction. Since we don't have any other template to use, we just adapt our existing models. Therefore, God is our "father" or our "king," and we are supposed to act accordingly, even though most of what we do really doesn't make sense if we are working under the assumption that this is deity who is all-knowing and all-powerful. Once again, I think this is an example of where an empirical explanation of religion ("it makes sense when you consider the evolution of human intelligence") is much more compelling than that offered by a theologian (eg "God is real and wants to have a 'relationship' with us so he acts like he is not omnipotent even though he is" or "the mysteries of God are beyond human comprehension" etc)

Magical Thinking

The New York Times had a excellent article in the Science Times section on what it calls "magical thinking." It points out that, rather than being a aberration, the belief in the ability to change reality through counterfactual methods like wearing lucky socks or performing certain pregame rituals is widespread, even among people who "know better" and admit that it has no logical basis. It would seem that the ability to detect complicated cause-and-effect relationships, especially when the mechanism is unknown, is so adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint that it outweighs the possible cost associated with mistaken beliefs. For example, the impulse to stick with a successful hunting technique or tool, even if one cannot rationally explain why it works, is extremely beneficial even if the same impulse also leads one utter a magical incantation as well. The potential upside (continued success) is much greater than the potential downside (spending a few seconds performing a ritual of questionable value).