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.

Abortion morality on Lifeboat Earth

re: should moral policy be based on science, not religion?

Every religion espouses a unique set of rules for living. There are Many hundreds of religions with active congregations. It would be impossible to find a subset of rules they all agree with.

Science can encode morality to a degree because of basic principles that are hardwired into the human brain (humans violate those rules every second, but they pay a heavy inner price for doing so). Of course science has its limits, and we're only starting to grasp the nature of consciousness.

The Bible ascribes consciousness to the fetus of John the Baptist, but doesn't say whether that was a special case--he being a prophet and all--and elsewhere gives babies no legal rights until they've survived 30 days out of the womb.

We can say, though, that "life" can't be said to begin at the moment of conception--monozygotic twins and chimeras along disprove that--along with the fact that so many fertilized eggs have zero chance of turning into a born, survivable baby. Even the inception of a heartbeat or brainwaves are arbitrary, with nothing linking these events to what we know as consciousness.

The only sure measure we have is survivability without modern medical care out of the womb. I'd be willing to sign on to that as a measure. Survivability with hi-tech care is morally appalling, since it excludes all those denied such an opportunity.

But for me the overpopulation crisis trumps all these considerations. That's why I say the morality of a land with infinite elbow room, infinite drinkable water, infinite arable land, is different from the morality of the lifeboat. The movie Life of Pi explores this BTW.

India has literally hundreds of millions of "food-insecure" people, many literally starving to death, and their land cannot sustain their current numbers. China does not, though it's close to a water crisis even so. China's morality vs. India's morality illustrates what I'm talking about.

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Studying philosophy II: Ultimate Question answered!

If you look in Comments under part one of this topic (right below this entry), you'll see some back & forth with someone who questioned the cheerfully metaphysicslessness of philosophical pragmatism, charging that pragmatists build their house on sand, proposing a world in which there's no particular reason to do one thing or another, neither for moral purposes nor for any other. My answer:

Here’s why: there is no why.

See, I am one of those hardcore prags, eh?

To be marginally less snarky, ultimately the only “why” is that gene pools with “it”—whatever “it” is—outcompeted gene pools that didn’t have “it.” Or less of “it.” Or a less elegant, less functional kind of “it.”

Our problem, collectively, is that most of us are raised to believe in some kind of Purpose external to reality--such that when people talk and talk without alluding to some such Purpose they seem to be evasive.

Not so though.

I asked my now-spouse-of-28-years to marry me while we were sitting on a log on a beach whose name she still can’t pronounce, with a couple of her very young nieces/nephews playing at our feet, on a glorious California summer day.

Why did I ask her? Why do I remember it to this day, as if it were yesterday? Why am I still in love with her? Why does it not matter to me that we’re devoted members of different political parties?

The answers to these questions are all interesting, and well worth asking, and of course nearly all “Why?” questions are nested Russian egg dolls.

And at the center of every one of these eggs there’s the ultimate answer: namely, something we don't yet (and perhaps won't ever) understand, somewhere in the quantum froth of subatomic physics. We also don’t know all the intermediary steps yet (or maybe ever), but that’s where you wind up in all probability. The best we can do is push the "Whys" farther and farther down into the bowels of reality.

Wolf Larson describes it more poetically in Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf”—something about life being like a vat of yeast, with all the little bits trying to climb over other little bits, but it boils down to the same thing.

I know what you’re going to say now: “So, Mr. Smarty Pants, if it’s all particle physics, and hence the whole universe was once a single virtual particle that went kaboom! or something like that 13.7 billion years ago, why did the Big Bang bang in the first place?

To which I say “How should I know?” Though string theory hints at branes kissing in the Bulk (read Brian Greene if you want more of that).

Humans experience powerful motivation, curiosity, empathy, inspiration yada yada. Hard to imagine that it’s all just quantum froth writ large.

And yet that's my best guess. Which doesn't help a bit with deciding whether to take your next vacation in Fiji or who to vote for or whether to return the wallet you found in the street five minutes ago.

That leads to the reductio ad absurdum argument that if morality is evolutionary it must be piffle and arbitrary and why bother?

But it only seems meaningless if you assume that meaning only comes from some external agency. Meaningfulness is built into our DNA, however. We want to live. We want to do the right thing, however we conceive that, within the constraints of evolution.

In other words, you’re lamenting the loss of something that isn’t lost because it wasn’t there in the first place.

Let me share the Scuba Diver’s Mantra:

1. What matters most to you?
Most people say “good job, good personal life, nice home, nice wheels, safe neighborhood, etc.”

2. Scuba divers say “Air.”
Because without that, all the rest becomes utterly meaningless in a millisecond.

3. So a scuba diver wakes up in the morning and asks himself two questions:
a. “Do I have air?”
b. “Am I in acute physical agony?”
If the answers to these are Yes and No, the diver then says:
“It’s a great day!”

As a diver, I have experienced being without air.
I think Sartre said that the prospect of being hanged focuses one’s mind tremendously.
Being without air does so even moreso, and in that instant when you try to take a breath and discover you can’t, all questions of meaning, of purpose, of “Why?” vanish like morning dew in a hot, rising sun.

I find life intensely, exquisitely meaningful because I’m wired that way. I didn’t wire me. Neither did anyone else. It just worked out that way. It doesn’t even require much intelligence. A hooked fish struggles to live, fights for its freedom. Even an amoeba moves away from negative stimuli.

Life itself creates meaning in a blind universe. Life is the meaning of life, and that innate meaningfulness inheres in every living thing, from a bacterium to a blue whale.

And by the same token, moral behavior is mediated by what works for a species. Vampire bats find it moral to suck other creatures’ blood—but also to share their blood meal with fellow vampire bats that weren’t so lucky that evening. Our core morality is hardwired and, human cultural diversity notwithstanding, not subject to our whims. We are driven to care for our peeps and defend them against our enemies, and we only violate our core directives at great personal expense.

That is, I’ve never met a happy putz. I’ve met rich putzes and poor ones; never happy ones. That's why you'll be happier if you return the wallet (with all the money in it).

We don’t need metaphysical “truth.” To be truthful, it just gets in the way, misleading us often as not.

Camus’ morality, he said, came down to this: “Work hard. Be kind.”

I’d only add “Turn rocks over.”

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.

When nations should intervene in other nations' internal affairs

My spouse and I spent 10 days on a boat on the equation far from any large land masses a few years ago. The boat held four American divers, four German/Austrian divers, and an Indonsian crew. One of the Germans was quick to point out that America was at fault for pretty much everything bad these days, and the others seemed to concur.

I asked her what America should do if Communist China invaded Taiwan. She said absolutely nothing. It was none of our business.

She was invoking the doctrine of national soverignty--that no nation has the moral right to interfere with other nations' actions regarding their own citizens. Of course in this case many would argue that all mutual defense treaties were also immoral and should be abrogated, since many of us believe that Taiwan is a country, not a part of China.

One way or another, it's not surprising to hear Germans espousing MYOB. After all, they interfered in other nations affairs not all that long ago, and they set a standard of immorality few can match.

And our fortunately former president did his best to give war a bad name, not through being evil like Hitler, but certainly venal.

Nevertheless. the world's nations are slowly coming to recognize that no nation has a right to murder its own people or anyone else for that matter. I said murder, not "kill." They're different, despite the mistranslation of the relevant commendment in the King James Bible.

In a better world an intelligently run and empowered United Nations would intervene in Somalia, Haiti, the Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, and China (at the very least over its military invasion of and slo-mo ethnicide in Tibet).

I consider myself a patriotic American, and I don't want America subsumed in a world government. But the community of civilized nations, to be moral, needs to come up with a way to deal with rogue and failed states.

Even on a purely selfish basis, such states are sources of infection for the rest of the world. Look at Somali piracy and Mexico's virtual conversion into a narco-state. Both affect many other nations. At the same time a bunch of nations are quickly destroying the ocean floor in Somalia's territorial waters, preventing their fishermen from earning a living, with no functioning government able to stop the foreign trawlers. We must intervene in both the piracy from Somalia and the trawler incursions into Somali territory.

Isolationism is impossible unless a nation withdraws into itself and imports and exports nothing. We'd have to go back to an 18th century agrarian economy to do that.

And American exceptionalism is also impossible, as Bush proved. The stronger a nation is, the more polite it needs to be to its allies. Otherwise they gang up on you. Again, it's both the right thing to do and the self-interested thing to do.