Arguing about religion

To me the real issue is whether people can construct a way to live ethically sans religion. Absent that, it's easy to see how someone religious would feel like attacks on religion are trying to pull the rug out from under him, leaving him with a meaningless, foundation-less existence if he loses his religion.

This is why an avowed atheist can't get elected President in America, and public opinion polls back this up--atheists are generally despised and distrusted by a big majority of Americans. They see atheism as the negation of all they hold dear.

Of course the very word--"atheist"--conveys negation. All it describes is what one doesn't believe, not what one does believe. So it's easy to see why the average American would think that atheists believe nothing.

Past that it's tough to describe to a religious person how one's life is organized--other than as a sociopath--if one is not religious. Most religious people believe that only religious people have the feelings of care for others, of empathy, of kindness that they and their co-believers claim exclusive possession of.

For me a person's stated beliefs are only meaningful as I see them acted on in our day to day existence. What you do is who you are no matter what you say.

So if someone's a jerk, whether they're a Catholic jerk or a Methodist jerk or a Zoroastrian jerk or an atheistic jerk, what I care about is their being a jerk. Ditto if they're nice guys, if they're interesting to be around, if their word turns out to mean something.

Your beliefs are your business. Your actions are society's business. I will infer your real beliefs from your real actions, and that's what I'll go on.

Science cannot figure out if God exists or not--true, but does it matter?

"Science cannot figure out if God exists or not."

This is literally true but misses how the progression of our understanding of the natural world has gradually occupied space once occupied by supernatural explanations.

What's left is ethics. Religious people dislike atheists so much in part due to the fear that without a deity's carrot (heaven) and stick (hell), humans wouldn't behave, and chaos would ensue.

Or that, at best, we'd wind up with the tribal morality summarized by the Arab saying "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my neighbor. Me, and my neighbor against the stranger."

This arena--the biology of good and evil--has been my particular interest for many decades. There's actually a fascinating book about it that I hope Jackie reads someday: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology.

Sociobiologists aren't saying they've found the Ten Commandments coded in our DNA. Just that we're designed to care for others--at least others who are related to us, others in our gene pool (perceived as our tribe). The great contribution of Christianity was in expanding the notion of "our tribe" to all peoples everywhere.

To put it another way, morality has an amoral basis--the gene pool's need to grow and prosper--with moral results: marriage, good citizenship, the Golden Rule, rule of laws, not men--and the willingness to defend all that, even with deadly force (if all peaceful alternatives have failed).

Religion articulates, shapes, and reifies natural impulses. Science can tell you where those impulses come from. It can't deal with the "supernatural" but it can tell you where the notion that there is a "supernatural" came from.

I have no desire to replace religion with nothing. I want humanity to live by moral codes. But across the rich world in particular, the moral codes of religions are gradually being supplanted by secular moral codes. This has already happened in much of Western Europe, and is expanding in America, though still by a small minority.

The advantage of moral codes based on nature is that nature is the firmest foundation. The disadvantage is that it's harder to explain to the average person. I can say that, living in a very secular neck of the woods--Silicon Valley--I don't see the nonreligious people I know stealing from orphans and cheating on their mates any more than do the religious people I know (and I know many of these as well, via my spouse).

The nonreligious people I know don't picket churches with placards saying "Don't Believe!" They just go about their business, never thinking about religion one way or another. It's simply irrelevant to them.

Judging religions from a public policy angle

I wrote the following entry for a thread on Amazon.com's Relgion forum:

Religion is a cognitive framework overlaying universal human tribality. Its validity isn't in its theology but in how well it maps to those universal human needs and to current exigencies.

I'm a lot less interested in each faith's doctinal particulars than in how its adherents behave.

"By their works ye shall know them."

For example, Mormon prayer is supposed to have you asking God for advice, not for special favors. And not even advice per se. In your prayer you tell God of something you're dealing with--along with what you propose to do about it. It you put in that work, then God, hopefully, will give you a wordless feeling as to whether you're barking up the right tree or if you need to go back to the drawing board, then ask God again when you have a new proposal.

Now even though I don't believe in any God, I find this approach to prayer kind of ideal--it encourages personal initiative and resonsibility. Which is good for society.

I notice most of the religious people in Amazon's Religion forum seem to focus on doctrine to the exclusion of actual practice, and the atheists and empiricists to critique different doctrines.

So let me encourage both sides to talk more about doctrine insofar as it shows up in pracitce. Because your doctrine is your own business, but your practice impinges on the rest of us.         

A religious thought problem

Suppose God Almighty showed up in low orbit, gigantic and undeniable, and spoke such that everyone alive heard His voice in their heads in their language, and He said:

"Guys, I just thought I'd drop by and clear up a few things. There is such a thing as good and evil, and for what it's worth I think you should do good and avoid evil. But when I organized the Universe I didn't put in a heaven. When you die, that's it. You're gone. I'm eternal--you're not. No heaven, no hell, no punishment, no reward.

"Now there is a hell, so to speak, in the span of your lives. Haven't you noticed that bad guys are never happy?  That's the elegance of my design. As is the heaven of a life well spent.

"Sorry if this requires some revision in your various Good Books, but that's the way it goes. I'll check back in a billion of your years and see how things are going. 'Bye."

----------------

So--what do you think would happen then? Knowing that heavenly reward/punishment was off the table, what would religious people do?

Science doesn't have all the answers

In Amazon.com's religion forum I got this point (science doesn't have all the answers).

My answer:

"science doesn't have all the answers..."

Wrong framework. Science has all the answers that we've been able to figure out so far. Religious people claim that they have the answers science lacks, but in scientific terms none of them are answers, just proof that "hope clouds observation." Why should anyone assume human beings have any reason or right to expect all answers to all questions? Doesn't the very idea seem ridiculous once it's articulated?

Here's the right framework:

All human beings start out knowing nothing. But they quickly experience positive and negative tropisms--i.e., some things feel good, others feel bad. Drinking mother's milk feels good. Lying around in a dirty diaper feels bad.

Nobody ever really "knows" anything. Each of us is trapped inside our bodies, building our weltanschaung via senses, thinking, experiment. Watch babies over a year and you'll see this at work.

Many people assume they have knowledge--even certainty. They're fooling themselves.

For example, how do you know the entire universe didn't pop into existence two seconds ago, complete with the artificial memories you now have of your past? How do you know some metabeing isn't dreaming us, and we'll all instantaneously pop out of existence when it wakes up? How do you know you aren't the only sentient being, who's asleep and is dreaming the rest?

The most certain people know even less than the most skeptical scientist, because they don't know what they don't know.

Science enables us to achieve exactly as much certainty as it's possible for humans to acquire.

That said, I'm confident, through a lifetime of experience, that the universe really exists, I exist, my spouse exists, yada yada. I'm not certain of any of this, but my convictions about such things approach certainty asymptotically.

Other things I'm less sure about. For example, I don't know how smart humpback whales are. I think sentient technological beings on other planets look like us, but neither you nor I will ever be able to prove or disprove that.

I'm guessing that the Higgs boson exists, but no one knows for sure yet. Go Super Hadron Collider!

What religious people don't know most is that the emotional experiences they think only religious people have, and without which they imagine life must seem meaningless and utterly lacking in a moral compass, is in fact universal, without any exclusive connection to religion--or to spiritualism in its many flavors either, for that matter.

We evolved with those emotions tens of millions of years ago when we were still arboreal primates, but they got a big boost around six million years ago when we adopted a walking/running existence on the ground, and then got an even bigger boost a million or so years ago as we developed our big brains (long after getting our upright stance and hands with opposable thumbs and feet specialized for walking).

The intensity of those feelings--beyond what even other social animals experience (notably dogs/wolves) stem from the fact that our big brains necessitate women being more incapacitated (and endangered) by pregnancy and childbirth) than other animals, and our childhoods lasting waaay longer than other animals.

Because of these things we have powerful tribal and familial bonding heuristics hardwired into our brains. They can be overridden by genetic defects or natal injury (such as fetal alcohol syndrome) or largely erased by a horrific childhood. Othewise we all get these feelings.

Religious people add a layer of cognitive furbelows to these feelings, and then try to get a patent on them.

Which is like a pharmaceutical firm trying to patent a natural medicine some Amazonian tribe has been using for a millenium.

So yes, Lateef, we all have the feelings you can get in church. The first time I sang "How great thou art" I got choked up and couldn't finish it. Not because the blood of Christ cleansed my "soul" but because it tapped those heuristics. The same heuristics, combined with the phenomenon of consciousness, give us what religious people call a soul.

But really it's the "miracle" of evolutionary chemistry.

Not to mention the fact that most adult chmpanzees recognize that it's themselves in the mirror after about half an hour. That elephants do too, but in less time as I recall. That dolphins do. Monkeys don't and can't. I don't know about the other primates. I bet gorillas and bonobos do, and maybe orangutans, but probably not gibbons.

But even if, say, dogs don't recognnize themselves in a mirror, they certainly have rich emotional lives--and a sense of fairness. And crows can do two-step logic mentally, without physical expermintation being required. And at least one parrot gained a vocabulary of over 100 understood words.

The border between us and the consciousness of other animals is not a bright line. Even fish and some cephalopods can show evidence of learning--of rudimentary thinking. And they certainly can feel pain. They have specialized pain sensors, just as we do. (No, I'm not a vegetarian--just a realist).

People who want to Believe will find all this stuff about "inexplicable" events and circumstances and acts by "special" people. And scientific debunkers spend inordinate amounts of time patiently deconstructing them all.

But you have to realize that science is not open minded, because we are mortal. Few scientifically trained people are going to explain why the world isn't flat to anyone but a five year old. Nor are we going to look at something on YouTube about an alchemist turning lead into gold.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. We try to reach farther. We don't hop off those shoulders and run around spinning our wheels to indulge others, then try to climb up again. Science, as a profession, is kind of harsh--it does not suffer fools gladly. Again, because we're mortal,

Tick tock, tick tock.

Sin vs. structure

A comment on my entry about Catholic Church structural reforms said:

I wish there were a structural solution to the problem of child abuse. But the problem has to do with sin and human nature, not with the structure of a human institution. As you note, all human institutions have an incentive to bury scandals.

Every one of us believes we are the captains of our souls, the masters of our fates, autonomous and self-creating, unaffected by political spin, by advertising, by the influence of our peers and parents and authority figures and society, and even the very language that we speak.

I feel all these things myself, all the time. To understand otherwise takes as much effort as trying to grasp 10-dimensional string theory. My mind is Newtonian--I don't know where to tuck all those extra dimensions, and I bet even those who can grasp the mathematics still have to wrestle with the human mind's Newtonian nature.

Yet as someone trained in the social sciences (and having worked in marketing in a previous career), I'm here to say the first step towards true autonomy is recognizing the degree to which each of us is an atom embedded in a social structure.

As Spinoza said, "Freedom consists of arranging your chains as comfortably as possible" or words to that effect.

Note that my commenter alluded to human nature trumping institutional structure. But human nature is social. We lived in small tribes for roughly 100,000 years. Our morality evolved to be constantly socially mediated--especially considering the fact that we had to be both murderous (towards enemy tribes) and tenderly loving (towards our own), and able to switch between those very different states quickly--and never adopt one state when the other is called for.

Years ago I read a powerful book on the Nazi phenomenon titled "They thought they were free." An American journalism professor (also a Jew, unbeknownst to those around him) got a job in a German university after WWII. He got to know a bunch of ordinary citizens who'd been Nazis, and this book is about how they became Nazis--and it's dedicated to them.

That really showed me how good people do bad things. I'm not talking about sociopaths and psychopaths. Just ordinary people with ordinary brains, ordinarily raised.

The infamous Stanford University prisoner-jailer experiment of the 1970s took just such people, and with nothing more than a different social structure, turned them into sadistic jailers and hardened prisoners in 24 hours.

Abu Graibh did the same thing, only for real. Most of the sadistic jailers were ordinary people, not -paths of any sort (though one ringleader probably was abnormal--but the others followed him).

Other social experiments have shown the same thing repeatedly, including a recent one in France disguised as a game show, where participants we led to believe they were administering painful electric shocks to contestants.

All this is only shameful if we cling to our false image of ourselves as totally independent. Yet even the old Aesop fable about the stork and the crows talks about the company we keep.

None of this absolves us of individual responsibility, or of the personal dark nights of the soul we have when we're wrestling with the toughest moral issues.

But it should affect our approach to criminality. If it's all about morality, then the law is about punishment. But if it's about keeping us safe, then the law is also about keeping us safe--in preventing future crimes above all.

And that's why the Catholic Church should change its structure (as per my previous blog entry), and why we need to adopt nonpartisan redistricting and proportional electoral college representation, and why we need to keep after large institutions constantly to keep/make them transparent.

None of this is a substitute for personal morality. It just takes our influence-ability into account, and it tries to tilt the playing field in favor of the sort of behavior we want as a society.