Gregory Paul: Is religion hurting America?

Autodidact paleontologist and self professed critic of religion Gregory Paul is back in the news again.   His 2005 paper correlating secularity and societal health was criticized severely in some circles, primarily for statistical reasons.  In an effort to shore up his data and refine his conclusions, Paul has published a new set of conclusions from existing data.

In the opening, Paul describes the debate over societal health and religiosity as consisting of two competing hypotheses:  The “moral creator hypothesis” involves the belief that belief in a higher power — specifically a creator who tells us how to behave properly — is an integral part of a successful society, even as far as economics.  The secular-democratic socioeconomic hypothesis predicts that higher levels of popular nonreligiosity and acceptance of evolutionary science in democratic countries are actually associated with superior national conditions.

Paul then highlights the very real set of problems faced by anyone interested in this subject.  To begin with, there’s precious little previous research.  For as much influence as religion has, it’s honestly shocking how little scholarly research has been done into the actual effects it has on individuals and societies.  Add to that the fact that many journals will simply not accept studies or articles on the subject.  (After Paul’s 2005 paper, the Journal of Religion and Society has not accepted further input on the topic.)

There is certainly a hostile attitude in both the mainstream and academia towards anyone who dares suggest that religion is quantifiably bad in some way or another.  Curiously, I’m reminded of the furor that erupted when a small group of historical scholars had the unmitigated audacity to suggest that maybe Jesus was just a literary figure, and never actually existed.

Such hostility is not unique in academia.  E.O. Wilson was literally physically assaulted in the 1970s while presenting his radical idea that humans are animals, and may be studied and predicted.  (Granted, the assault consisted of having a bucket of ice water thrown on him, but it’s still physical assault.)   There is still considerable resistance to many of the implications of humans’ evolutionary origins.

As an aside, I realize that there have been heated scientific debates that didn’t involve religion.  (General relativity was shouted down pretty hard until it was conclusively proven.)  However, I can’t help but notice that only when religion is involved do we see active study being vigorously discouraged.

It’s also true that jumping on the wrong side of the theory bandwagon can be bad for your career.   The debate over gamma ray bursts sent several scientists to the proverbial doghouse when they suggested that they were coming from outside our galaxy.  (Of course, they were later proven correct, and hailed as visionaries.)

Still, I can’t help but think that there’s something different about religious issues.  From a non-Christian point of view, why should anyone pop a blood vessel over Jesus being a literary figure, not a historical one?  Why should it scare us so much to think that maybe religion is bad for people and society?  Yet these two questions, more than any other in recent years, draw out vitriol from nearly all sides.  How dare we question these things!!

Intuitively, it seems that maybe all the resistance is symptomatic of a deeply rooted fear that maybe it’s true.  The critics of anti-theists keep saying that we’re just over-reacting, and that religion can’t be causally linked to societal or personal ills.  The religious paint us as demons trying to destroy the moral and economic fabric of life as we know it.  So…  if they’re right, why isn’t anybody proving it?  It seems like the religious and the anti-anti-theists are very interested in poo-pooing and naysaying any statistical link that pops up, but nobody’s interested in just setting the matter to rest by doing comprehensive, multi-cultural, empirical research on the matter.

If religion is good for society, so long as it’s not misused, why isn’t the Templeton Foundation trotting out peer reviewed material by the truckload?  Religion is probably the second biggest industry in the universe, behind sex.  Vindicating it scientifically would shut us anti-theists up.  After all, we’re the ones who keep harping about evidence, and the flexibility of belief inherent in the rational materialist worldview.

Yet, such research is discouraged, shouted down, and nitpicked.  I think we’re afraid of the truth.

It remains to be seen how Paul’s new effort will be received.  I don’t intend to comment on the quality of his data or statistical analysis.  However, I think it’s worth noting that his conclusion doesn’t sound as “anti-religious” as we might imagine, given his openly antagonistic opinions of American religious culture.  In a nutshell, he suggests that prosperity and societal health tend to reduce religiosity.  Religious faith is not, as has been suggested, a deeply ingrained human desire for meaning.  Instead, it’s a coping mechanism for when things really suck.  The more we improve the human condition, the less we need religion.

That hardly seems like something that ought to make us afraid.  If it’s true, then it gives us an interesting new set of goggles for viewing American culture.   It also gives us a new launching point for more research.  Does religious belief perpetuate or exacerbate bad conditions, or does it just alleviate stress when conditions are bad?  Is religious belief a crane that helps lift a society out of dysfunction, such that it no longer needs religion, or does belief create complacency and resistance to positive change?

These are questions we can answer.  For anyone who cares about the human condition, these are questions we must answer.  Whether this new paper is borne out as credible and valid or not, I commend Mr. Paul for sticking to his guns and at least trying to answer the big questions about religion and society.  At the very least, it should frighten us that only a rogue autodidact is even trying.

Thanksgiving

I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating holidays since leaving religion.  It’s been more traumatic than you might think.  Easter was the only easy one.  I no longer celebrate Easter because it’s pretty much completely identified as a Christian holiday celebrating how Jesus dripped multicolored blood on eggs and turned his cross into chocolate bunnies to escape painful death at the hands of the Romans.

Christmas was more difficult.  After all, the Christians grinched Christmas from the Pagans, and made it into Hallmark and Hasbro Day.  I’m not really good at either giving or receiving gifts, and the anti-consumerist in me feels weird about having to buy something for everybody I know, especially when half of the gifts are going to sit in a closet collecting dust or get returned on Boxing Day.  I have a weakness for A Christmas Story, though.

I have been through similar mental gymnastics about pretty much every holiday, deciding whether or not I’m going to celebrate, and if so, how.  By far the most difficult holiday for me is Thanksgiving.  There’s a part of me that agrees with Christina Ricci’s character in The Ice Storm:

In principle, I like the idea of Thanksgiving.  We’ve made it through another year;  there are enough crops for a feast;  we are lucky enough to be surrounded by friends, family, and loved ones.  It’s cause for celebration.

The fact is, I’m also a sucker for a feast.  I love to cook, and I’ve stayed up all night many times to prepare an entire Thanksgiving feast by myself.  (Check out Sweet Potato Creme Brulee.  It’s amazing.)  I had to stop eating at all you can eat buffets several years ago because I like to eat until I’m too stuffed to move.  Thanksgiving is the one day I can give myself permission to do it with no guilt.

Still, there’s the nasty underbelly of Thanksgiving —  European imperialism, the systematic extermination of Native Americans, the American sense of entitlement, and the slightly icky feeling we get when we throw away enough food in one afternoon to feed a family of four for a week — knowing that there are plenty of families of four who could really use it.

I am beginning to think that maybe all of that is extraneous.  I didn’t kill Native Americans, and I make a point to donate food to a homeless shelter every Thanksgiving.   I think I’m doing my part, even if it’s a small part.   Still, I feel sort of like the kid who all the children snicker about because he opts out of the Pledge of Allegiance.  Is Thanksgiving a religious holiday?  Don’t most families still thank God for everything they’re about to gorge themselves on?  Isn’t it still a kind of remembrance of America’s manifest destiny, granted by Jesus Christ himself to all the good Caucasians?

I still don’t know.  I’m going to celebrate Thanksgiving this year with a family whose matriarch and patriarch both graduated from the infamous Bob Jones University, and I’ll do what I’ve always done at such gatherings.  I’ll sit quietly while a prayer of thanks is offered to our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.  I won’t rock the boat, and I’ll enjoy good food and good company.  I might even have to sit through a repeat of one particularly memorable dinner, where the diners were regaled with tales of how brown people are cursed by God because of the Tower of Babel.

Maybe there’s a lesson in Thanksgiving for all of us freethinkers and atheists.  We gripe (justifiably, I might add) all the time about laws that discriminate against us, and “News Reports” portraying us as un-American, and the unwritten religious tests that prohibit atheists from holding public office.  Even so, there is only so much that can be taken from us.  We can celebrate Thanksgiving for what it means to us, and if we don’t want to have a prayer, we don’t have to have a prayer.   It can be a perfectly meaningful and enjoyable holiday with nothing more than food, family, and football.  It doesn’t have to feel like something is missing, or that we’re leaving something out.

I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings about participating in a religious Thanksgiving feast, but I’m going to do it, mostly because I think I owe it to myself and to the Christians in attendance to practice what I preach.  The biggest part of tolerance is realizing that there will be things that must be tolerated.   There are precious few times when I can participate with Christians while celebrating for entirely different reasons.  I suppose I’m thankful that there’s at least one time that I can.

 

Terrorists Among Us

Think Christians aren’t like Muslims?  Think again.

An atheist billboard in Cincinnati has been relocated after the landowner received “significant threats” demanding its removal.

“Everything that has happened shows just how vital our message is,” said Shawn Jeffers, co-coordinator for the Cincinnati Coalition of Reason. “It proves our point, that bigotry against people who don’t believe in a god is still very real in America. Only when we atheists, agnostics and humanists come together and go public about our views will people have a chance to learn that we too are part of the community and deserve respect.”

Let’s not be gracious about this.  The people responsible for these threats are terrorists.  There is no other reasonable way to look at it.  While there are thousands of church advertisements littering roadsides all over America, theists (presumably Christians) are not happy to grant the same freedom to atheists.  They have taken matters into their own hands, and are attempting to subvert the Constitution through threats of violence or anything else that sufficiently terrorizes anyone who sides with us.  They are terrorists.

The first thing that needs to be done about this is simple.  The FBI, or the Department of Homeland Security, or somebody needs to pursue these people as doggedly as they would pursue someone who had called in a bomb threat to an airport.  They are criminals, and need to be punished severely.  The freedom of speech is crucial to everything that America is supposed to stand for.  Attacking that freedom is literally attacking America.

The second thing that needs to be done is that everyone — atheist or not — who values freedom needs to vocally denounce attitudes like that of Jack Jones, of downtown Cincy:

“My thoughts? I think the sign needs to come down. Its atheist. Its going to cause problems around all the churches, not just catholic, but lutheran, baptist, all of them,” said Jack Jones of Downtown.

Let’s think about this statement for a minute.  The billboard is going to cause problems??  What problems could it possibly cause?  Is it calling for violence?  Is it threatening anyone in any way?  Is it advocating anything illegal or unethical?

No.  Of course it isn’t.  So what problems could it cause?

You and I both know the answer to this.  Some theists might get so offended by it that they cause problems for atheists.  Let’s be very clear about this.  They want us to stay silent and invisible, and are willing to resort to violence to ensure that state of affairs.

There is no other way to look at it.  This is terrorism.

I’m very offended by this attempt to deny us our freedom.  I’m angry.  I am not interested in hearing moderate theists cry about how not all theists are extremists.  I don’t care about any of that.  I just want these terrorists stopped.  I want the government to protect all of its citizens equally.  I’m tired of terrorism being selectively prosecuted based on the whims of the majority religion.

Doubt vs Doubt

I love discovering new conflations.   Or rather, I love discovering that there’s a conflation being bandied about that I hadn’t noticed before.  You see, I believe that a substantial number of disagreements, misunderstandings, and in general, a lot of the problems in the world, are caused by conflations.  There are two common ways in which conflations cause problems:

1. Internally.  Sometimes, we don’t recognize the distinction between two concepts, and use them interchangeably in our critical thinking.
2. Externally.  Sometimes, we use a word that can be easily conflated, and assume that the person hearing our argument is using the same definition that we are.

This taps into one of the most basic problems with language.  It is at best a fallible and incomplete tool for information transfer between humans.  There is no “solution” to the fallibility of language.  All we can do is go to whatever lengths we can to make sure that we are reducing the possibility of misunderstanding to a minimum.

With this in mind, I’d like to introduce my newly discovered conflation:  Doubt.

Thanks to my friend and critic GFeliz for putting me onto this line of thinking, by the way.   Anyway, when I was a Christian, I went to my youth ministers from time to time and expressed doubts about some of the things I was being taught.   I was told that doubt is a common emotion and that the power of my faith would overcome my doubts.

When I went to college, I was taught that doubt is the foundation of knowledge, since the word itself embodies the principle of the Burden of Proof.  I was taught to methodically and unceasingly doubt every claim, and to demand proof appropriate to the weight of the concept in contention.

I’ve just now realized that yet again, theists and atheists are speaking two entirely different languages.   Of course, I’ve already given away the punch line.  The word doubt can apply to an emotion or a methodology.   The emotional context of doubt is difficult to pin down, but what we can say is that like other emotional states, it’s physiological.  I clearly remember breaking out in a cold sweat when I realized that I wasn’t certain that I was going to heaven.  We can all relate to the emotion of doubt.  We’ve all waited nervously by the phone for one reason or another.  The anxiety is real.

When I was told to let my faith overcome doubt, I was really being taught to let one emotion overcome another.  Faith, by definition, is not evidence, so any feeling of certainty had to come from somewhere else.   The concept of heaven is really nice to a believer.  Believing that we are unconditionally loved by a father figure who wants only the best for us is equally attractive.  Believing that we are “chosen,” or “special” in the eyes of God feels very good.  When I experienced uncertainty, I focused on the positive feelings I had when I was certain, and tried to let those feelings quell any negative emotions.  Usually, this approach was relatively effective.

It was also an internal conflation.  My doubt came in two forms — emotional and intellectual — but the intellectual was first.  Something just didn’t make sense.  If my memory serves me right, the first serious doubts I developed came from the question of all the non-Christians who had never even heard of Jesus.  None of the answers to this theological problem seemed sufficient to me.   The intellectual doubt led to questions.  The questions led to possibilities, and those possibilities gave me the emotion of doubt.  Unfortunately, the first few times I discovered the intellectual doubt, I responded by applying emotion to the problem.

(As an aside, this is one of the manifestations of faith-based reasoning.  Since logic and evidence are specifically distrusted, faith-based reasoning encourages emotional decisions, and as readers of my blog know, emotions are nature’s way of getting us to do things we wouldn’t rationally do otherwise.  They are not to be trusted.)

For the learned critical thinker (Luv ya, True Believer!), doubt is specifically not emotional.  In fact, doubt as a method is particularly useful when we are experiencing strong emotions because it forces us to try to find an answer regardless of any emotional attachment we have to any potential solutions.   As I said before, doubt as a method is the consistent, unyielding application of the Burden of Proof.  A skeptic is a person who attempts to apply this method to all areas of life.  He believes that until and unless a thing is proven true, it is treated as if it is not true.

Intellectual, methodological doubt is hard.  The cold reality of life is that things often are as bad as they seem, and scam artists really are all over the place, and if it’s too good to be true, it’s false.   These realities aren’t pleasant to think about, and sometimes they make us feel sad or depressed or hopeless.  Real doubt can and often does make our life more emotionally difficult because it forces us to face reality squarely instead of relying on blind optimism to make us feel better while we’re fiddling and the fires are blazing.

To add an interesting twist to this entire line of thinking, it’s just occurred to me that faith-based reasoning actually facilitates (if not causes) a disconnect between the two versions of doubt.  When I, a skeptic, feel intellectual doubt about something important, I also feel emotional doubt.  Likewise, when I feel emotional doubt, I am alerted that I need to put my brain in high gear and look for signs of cognitive dissonance, or for unsupported claims.  The emotion and the intellect work in conjunction.  If I feel emotional doubt, and my intellect convinces me that I have sufficiently accounted for the Burden of Proof, and have good reason to believe a claim, that knowledge eases my emotions.  For the faith based theist, however, the emotion of doubt is a call to avoid intellectual inquiry and tap into an alternate emotional reserve.   In fact — and I am remembering this happening to me — Doubt and Doubt become opposed!  When I began applying critical thought to Christianity, the more intellectual certainty I achieved, the more emotional doubt I experienced!

So, the moral of the story is that emotional doubt may or may not be valid.  We may be emotionally uncertain about something that is actually set in stone, or certain about something that is completely false.   Intellectual, methodological doubt, however, should be our default state of existence at all times.  When we hear someone talking about alleviating doubts, we need to remember to ask ourself if we’re supposed to be feeling emotional certainty or if we’re being encouraged to explore every possible argument for or against a claim to satisfy the Burden of Proof.  I’m going to start watching for this conflation more.  I hope you, gentle readers, will do so as well.

 

Greta Christina — Top One Reason Religion is Harmful

I know I’ve directed your attention towards this argument before, but I honestly believe it is the coup de grâce in the debate over whether or not faith based belief is inherently beneficial or harmful.  Before I go on any further, I need to make my standard disclaimer.  In deference to Greta’s post, I used the word religion in the title.  However, I am speaking only of one particular variety of religion, namely the kind that relies on faith based reasoning.  It is acceptable in some circles to define certain ethical philosophies as religions, even though they are not based on the supernatural, deities, or magic.  Personally, I’m very wary of granting any religion a pass on this, but in deference to the possibility that there might be a genuinely scientific ethical philosophy that calls itself a religion, I restrict my criticisms only to faith based religions.

Here are Greta’s words:

I’m realizing that everything I’ve ever written about religion’s harm boils down to one thing.

It’s this: Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality … and extreme, grotesque immorality.

I’ve made this argument before, and most of my readers are probably familiar with it.  However, today, I want to address a counter-claim from those who believe faith-based religion to either be benign, beneficial, or neutral as a moral force.   Many of these people will claim that the negative aspects of religion are counter-balanced by its ability to mobilize groups of people towards socially beneficial behaviors, such as charity, caring for the sick, self sacrifice, and the mobilization of large groups of people towards the common good.

This counter-argument is really a common theist argument in disguise.  Atheists and the non-religious have been portrayed by the religious as morally depraved, unhappy, missing out on something, etc, for as long as they’ve been visible.   The thing is, nobody’s ever stopped to demand evidence.  The assumption that religion inspires people to be more moral is just a reverse version of the same claim — a claim that has never been demonstrated scientifically.

And let’s review our basic critical thinking, shall we?  What do we do with claims for which there is no evidence?  We assume them to be false until proven true.

Just to be clear, let’s state this again in a different way.  Before we discuss causality, we must address whether or not there is even a difference in behavior.  Is there a difference in the amount of good moral behavior between faith and non-faith based belief systems?  In order to claim that faith has a positive effect on people’s morality, we must first demonstrate that there is, in fact, a difference that demands an explanation!

I have yet to see the evidence.

On the other hand, here’s a very, very long list of bad moral behavior that is at the very least strongly correlated with faith based religious belief.    We can also talk about very specific examples of religious ideology and bad behavior.  I have used myself as an example before, and my critics are unusually silent.  To recap, when I was a Christian, I was bigoted against gays.  I believed gays to be morally depraved, sinful, and genuinely evil people.  The only reason I believed this was that I believed god had said it was true.   I had no other evidence either for or against the belief.  Because of my religious belief, I treated gays poorly, excluded them from social activities, and spoke badly about them to anyone who would listen.  This is undeniably bad moral behavior.

Are there non-religious homophobes and bigots?  Yes, there are.  I don’t think I’ve ever said that religion is the only cause of bad behavior.  I’m quite tired of that objection, as a matter of fact.  The only question at hand is whether or not religion does cause bad behavior.  In at least one example — me — I can testify that it does.  This is still a long way from being able to say that faith based religion causes bad behavior on a large scale, but wait… didn’t we just look at a long list of bad behaviors that are strongly correlated with faith based reasoning?

To be fair, there have been occasional studies that have at least demonstrated a correlation between religious practice and a couple of good moral behaviors, but we’re not talking about big differences.  We’re talking about differences of a few percentage points.  I have never claimed that there aren’t people who believe God wants them to build houses for free, or donate all their extra money to charity.   However, when I look for large-scale mass movements of humans, I simply don’t see anything positive that balances with the negative.

Where’s the corresponding long list of good behaviors that are strongly correlated with faith based reasoning?  Where is the effort to end poverty that is correspondingly as large as the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition?  Where is the effort to promote egalitarianism and equal rights that is as large as the effort to criminalize, marginalize, and legally discriminate against gays?

Frankly, I’m tired of having the burden of proof shifted on me.  When I claim that faith based reasoning has no reality check, I’m stating the obvious.  When I claim that faith based reasoning can be used to justify otherwise unjustifiable actions, I am stating the obvious.  Yet, for some reason, when I move from this claim to the observation that sometimes faith actually does get used to justify otherwise unjustifiable actions, I’m raked over the coals.

Yet… the same critics fail to justify their own claim — that religion elevates people’s morality to any significant degree.

To conclude, let me make sure to articulate the double standard very clearly:

• Faith is unique in that it allows, and perhaps even encourages, justifying the unjustifiable.  The cause of this is the lack of a reality check.
• Good behavior can be, and often is, justified with a reality check, quite apart from faith.  In fact, it’s quite simple to justify any good behavior without faith.
• The defenders of religion are the ones making an unjustified claim — that faith also has the property of increasing the intensity or frequency of good acts which can and are perfectly justifiable without faith.

Until it is demonstrated that faith does, in fact, increase the amount of good in the universe, we’re left with several disturbing realizations:

Faith can be used to justify the unjustifiable.  There is a very long list of unjustifiable bad behavior that has been directly attributed to faith by the very people committing the acts.

We have no corresponding long list of exceptionally good behavior directly attributed to faith by the very people committing the exceptionally good acts.  We have no evidence that faith is used to justify the justifiable significantly more often than it is justified without faith.

In light of these facts, I find it disingenuous at best for anyone to suggest that it is we, the atheists, who must justify our claim that religion is a force for evil.

 

 

Catholic Bishops Contradict Science Again

AP reports that the Catholic Church has again gotten things wrong with regard to gays and marriage:

BALTIMORE – The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have affirmed that the church defines marriage between one man and one woman, and sex is meant for procreation.

The pastoral letter was issued Tuesday in Baltimore by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

To be fair, “marriage,” in its strictest sense, is a political institution, and we can define it any way we choose.  However, if we’re going to attempt to enter into the realm of fact, we’re going to have to look at marriage for what it represents, namely, the long term pair bonding between two or more people.  In this context, the Church is simply wrong.

To begin with, sex is most certainly not just for procreation.  Throughout human history, and across all known cultures, there have always been significant sexual practices that have been specifically social, and definitively not reproductive in nature.   This is beyond historical or anthropological dispute.  In fact, it’s very much like the supposed “debate” between evolution and creationism.  The fact is there is no debate, either regarding evolution or human sexuality.  There are only the informed and the ignorant.

Secondly, homosexuality in the animal kingdom is not the exception.  It is the rule.  That is, it’s actually relatively difficult to find species which do not have some elements of homosexuality in their sexual behaviors.  Homosexuality exists in most primates, including humans, in predictable, consistent percentages of the population.  Both lesbian and gay pair bonding is common.

I have on my desk at this moment a book called “Biological Exuberance” by Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D.  It is 742 pages of meticulous documentation of non-heterosexual behavior in the animal kingdom.  Within these pages are scientific documentation of virtually every sexual practice you can think of.  In fact, it has become quite clear to me that the only corner of the sexual market monopolized by humans is the artistic depiction of sex.  Even the use of toys or mechanical sex aids is not unique to humans.

While we’re on the subject of the rest of the animal kingdom, we should note that primates, including humans, are just one of the gang when it comes to non-reproductive sex.  From birds to octopuses to prairie dogs, social animals everywhere engage in sex for social reasons, as well as strictly for pleasure.  Masturbation, mutual masturbation, anal sex, orgies, voyeurism, exhibitionism — all of these practices exist outside of humanity.

No, Catholic Church.  Marriage is not just between a man and a woman.  No, sex is not just for reproduction.  You are wrong.  The evidence is there if you’d like to look.  It’s as clear as the nose on your face.  You are wrong.  End of story.

 

Design and Transitional Fossils

This is Tiktaalik.  It was discovered by Neil Shubin and several of his colleagues, who had been looking for it for over a decade.  In many ways, Tiktaalik is the scientific equivalent of the Crocoduck.  It really is a transition between two modern forms of life — fish and amphibians.

The details of Tiktaalik’s “transitional nature” are very interesting, but rather than focus my attention in that direction, I want to instead use the story of its discovery to help dispel a couple of misconceptions about evolution and Intelligent Design.

Prediction

The first thing that’s important about Tiktaalik’s discovery is that it was not accidental.  Neil Shubin, et al, had been searching for it in very specific locations for many years.  This fact alone highlights one of the major differences between Intelligent Design Theory (sic!) and Evolutionary Theory.  Like all valid scientific theories, evolution is powerful as a predictive tool.  Using what they already knew about evolutionary theory, scientists predicted three crucial facts about Tiktaalik before ever laying eyes on it.

1. The structure of its fins, neck and head
2. Its age
3. The location of its fossils.

This may not seem like much, but in the broad scheme of evolutionary biology, these three factors are crucially important.  The scientists were searching for the secret of the transition between fins and limbs, as well as the origin of necks, which was a huge evolutionary step.  Because of the placement of fossils in the geologic column, scientists were able to say with relative certainty that before the Devonian Period, there simply were no animals with necks or limbs.  Fins there were aplenty, but no limbs or necks.  They were looking for an animal with intermediate qualities between limbs and fins, and they knew that it had lived around 375 million years ago.  They could make this guess based on the fact that there simply are no land animal fossils before a certain date, and after another date, there are fully transitioned limbs.  Therefore, the transition had to have occurred during a specific window.

At this point, let me make one thing abundantly clear.  There has never been one scientific prediction made by a scientist using Intelligent Design Theory.  Using evolutionary theory, scientists boarded a plane and flew to within a couple of miles of where they eventually found the fossil they were looking for — the fossil they knew would have a flat head, a neck, and something in between limbs and fins. Out of all the land on earth, they picked precisely the right location, based entirely on the predictions of evolutionary theory.

The measure of a theory’s validity is its accuracy in making predictions.  Evolutionary theory is used daily to make accurate predictions.  If you have taken medicine from any recent pharmacological discoveries, it’s very likely that you have evolutionary theory to thank.  If you have eaten produce or meat from a grocery store, you have evolutionary theory to thank.  Evolution’s ability to make predictions is unrivaled.  In fact, saying it is unrivaled does not do it justice.  There is simply not a competing theory which has made accurate predictions.

Perfect Design

Tiktaalik’s appendages are neither limbs nor fins.  In fact, they are fins which are en route to becoming limbs.  Even more astonishing, they are rather definitive proof of the falsehood of one of Intelligent Design’s claims — the “perfection of design.”  It is supposed that each plant or animal is “perfectly suited” to its environment, and that this perfection implies a perfect creator.

The truth of the matter is that very few, if any, designs in nature are “perfect.”   What exactly do we mean when we say that a design is perfect?  Perfect in what sense?  Perfect against what template?  The fact that something survives to reproduce doesn’t imply any sort of perfection.  It only indicates enough survival competence to survive.  In the same way, the fact that an appendage performs a task adequately doesn’t mean it’s perfect.  It means it is sufficient.

We can see this clearly in humans.  We have wisdom teeth that need surgical removal.  Our eyesight is generally far less than crystal clear.  Our hearing can indicate the general direction of a sound’s source, but not its precise location.  We can detect seriously spoiled meat by smell, but not the presence of harmful bacteria which will make us sick even though the meat smells fine.

We know from our scientific examination of the rocks in which Tiktaalik was found that it lived in shallow streams and mud flats.  By examining its skeletal structure, we know that it could push itself up on its half-fin-half-limbs.  It could probably also propel itself for short distances on land or in shallow mud.  Unlike fish, its skeletal structure could take the extra gravity.  Is this design perfect?  Hardly.  It surely couldn’t go far out of water, and could only lift itself a short distance, probably for relatively short durations.  (Think of our primate cousins who can walk with difficulty on two legs for short distances, but must resort to their four legged gate relatively quickly.)

The fact is, all life is transitional.  That is, the notion of a transitional species is interesting when a new and relatively unique adaptation appears.  Lungs, necks, shoulders, wings, etc, are all very interesting adaptations, and when we find a creature in an intermediate stage between any of these and their predecessors, it makes all the science journals.  But these evolutionary “leaps” are relatively rare.  Once evolution has stumbled upon something that works, it tends to keep it so long as it’s still sufficient for the task.

As you can see, the basic structure of these two limbs is more or less identical.  One bone, two bones, lots of little bones, then finally, digits.  This is the same for all arms (and wings) in the animal kingdom — not because it’s the “perfect design” but because the essential underlying structure works well enough, and with the right design tweaks, it can be adapted (get it?!  ADAPTED!) to many different tasks and environments.

The big leap from fish to land animal was the development of wrists and shoulders.  Tiktaalik has a shoulder, and it has the one bone base of modern limbs, but the rest of its appendage is a fin.  This is not a perfect design.  It’s a design that works for the time being.  Rather than take its chances against fish twice its size in deeper waters, Tiktaalik found refuge and enough food to survive in shallows.  It was competent.

Treadmills

Evolution is not a journey to a destination.  It’s a run on a treadmill.  In the competition for survival, species must keep a certain pace or they will be left behind.  Complexity and design innovations are not moving towards perfection.  They are simply the discovery (by mathematical chance) of design innovations that work well enough for individuals to survive and reproduce.

We can see this concept clearly in humans, who are even now developing new design innovations to help us cope with our conspicuously high lactose intake as adults, which is a new environmental challenge to overcome.  We are constantly evolving, though most of the changes are too small for us to detect.  Four limbs, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, and one set of genitals works well enough for us to survive admirably, and without a sustained driving pressure for innovation, we will continue to have the same basic design.

Since Tiktaalik or one of its cousins first developed the neck, there hasn’t been a new, better alternative to the neck.  Instead, the basic design has been adapted across literally millions of species, each of whom needed this or that tweak for the neck to be functional enough to facilitate survival in new environmental niches.  Every species with a neck is a transitional species.  The transition is from one environment, in which the “old” neck is sufficient, to a new environment, in which the new, slightly modified neck is sufficient for the tasks a neck must perform, but the old neck either doesn’t work anymore, or works less effectively than the new one.

Perhaps part of the allure of Intelligent Design is the relative rarity of new design innovations.  Perhaps it seems that because arms and legs are nearly ubiquitous among animals, that there is some magical perfect formula suggesting that four limbs, shoulders, and wrists were handed out to all comers.  Evolutionary theory, however, predicts that once the four limb arrangement became fully formed, it became prohibitively unlikely that any design innovations could overtake it.   It is telling that the best design engineers in the world tend not to design self-propelled robots with four limbs.  Instead, they use wheels, or six or eight legs, or tracks.  Our design is not perfect.  It’s just what we happened to get when Tiktaalikneeded to get out of the way of bigger fish, and started doing pushups in the shallows.

Free Will and Christian Theology

I’ve written before that I don’t believe in free will.  The article itself needs some cleaning up and clarification, which I’m sure I’ll get to when I have another eight hours a day to work on writing.  I’m revisiting the idea today because memes seem to come in cycles, and I’m seeing a lot of dickering about free will lately.

The essence of my argument against freewill is twofold.  The first element is the incoherence of the concept itself.  Second, I believe what people think they are talking about when they say free will conflates hypothetical and actual possibility.  I’ll briefly explain both arguments.

Defining “Free Will” is much more difficult than most people imagine.  We speak of choice as if we know exactly what it is, but without getting into the nuts and bolts of brain mechanics, it’s really hard to explain.  Superficially, a choice is the selection of one out of multiple options.  The thing is, every animal capable of locomotion makes such choices.  If you put an ant on a completely flat surface, it inevitably will do one of three things.  It will move in one direction, it will stand still, or it will die.  If it moves, it will move in one of many possible directions.  If it stands still, it will be doing that instead of moving.  Only if it dies will it cease to make choices.

Free Will implies something more than that, however.  We humans suppose that our choices are qualitatively different than an ant’s because we think about our choices.  However, this clarification doesn’t get us out of our quagmire.  Ants have rudimentary brains, and their brains process information.  The result of this process is the ant’s movement.  That’s what humans do, too, right?

Of course, human choices are qualitatively different than ant choices.  The difference is twofold — abstraction and second order thought.  That is, we can think of concepts, and we can think about thinking about concepts.  To be fair, I should note that it is now known that humans are not the only animals capable of abstraction.  However, our ability to think about thinking appears unique.

When I decide whether to have fish or chicken for lunch, I am exercising a number of mental faculties available only to humans.  I might, in my decision making process, even think about the process I’m using to reach a decision!  I could, in mid-decision, decide to change the method I’m using for decision making.  This kind of mental maneuvering is what most people think of when they imagine free will.

Still, this working definition of free will leaves out the “free” part.  In fact, what’s missing is crucial to Christian theology.  There is an assumption that any human can make any decision at any time.   But even here, we have a problem.  Are we talking about hypothetical possibility or physical possibility?  If we are speaking philosophically, we can legitimately say that a human is capable of deciding anything conceivable.  However, if we speak of actual possibility, it’s a different story.

My Go-To example of this is simple.  If we really are capable of making any decision at any time, then it ought to be a simple matter for you, gentle reader, to decide right now that you have no hands.   Of course, you cannot do so.  It is impossible for you to decide something that gives every appearance of being completely false.

To use a much scarier example, it is similarly impossible for us to decide to take actions we believe to be the wrong choice.  If free will really does exist, it should be a simple matter for you, gentle reader, to decide to never again wear clothes of any kind.  Or, perhaps you should decide to buy a gun and shoot everyone you love in the head.  Right now.  For no reason other than proving free will.

Luckily for us, such free will does not exist.  We are bound by our existing beliefs.  And this is where Christian theology falls flat on its face.

Beginning with the story of original sin, we are left with nonsensical premises.  Adam and Eve “sinned” by choosing to eat of the forbidden fruit.  God chose to punish all of mankind for choosing to defy him, and then God chose to offer man salvation if only he would choose to believe that Jesus lived, and was God Incarnate, and was crucified, buried, and resurrected after three days.

All of this sounds nice, but if it is true that we are limited in our available choices, then the reality is that some people simply cannot choose to believe in Jesus.

As an aside, I suppose one could make the argument that some beliefs can be adopted freely by any human, while others can’t.  The problem is that there is simply no evidence to support this position.  There’s no scientific theory of which I’m aware that suggests that a certain class of claim has the property of excluding itself from the normal decision making process.  Indeed, if such a class of claims exist, the proof of its existence would literally cause us to have to completely rethink everything we know of psychology, logic, and philosophy.   (And just to throw a monkey wrench into the works, if the proof of such a class was a member of the class in question, how would we ever prove such a thing without having the proof before proving it?!?)

In any case, for any Christians who might be reading this, I can prove to you that neither of us is capable of choosing to believe as the other believes.  If it is true that anyone can choose to believe in Jesus, it must also be true that anyone can choose not to believe in Jesus.  Also, since choice is free, and we can literally choose any belief we’d like, you can do a really fun experiment that will not affect your eternal salvation.  Here’s what you do.

1.  Find a nice, safe place where the likelihood of life-ending disaster is virtually zero.

2. Choose not to believe in Jesus for five minutes.

3. After five minutes, choose to believe in Jesus again.

Simple, right?

Except that you can’t do it.  You can choose to pretend like you don’t believe in Jesus.  You can play mental games where you imagine what your beliefs would be like if you didn’t believe in Jesus.  You can even decide that you’d really like to try not believing in Jesus for five minutes.

But you can’t decide not to believe.  You either believe or you don’t.

The same is true of us atheists.  No matter how much I might want to believe in Jesus, I cannot.  Imagine if the Templeton Foundation offered me ten million dollars to genuinely believe in Jesus right now.  Trust me — I’m no dummy.  I would really, really want to believe in Jesus so that I could get ten million dollars.  But I couldn’t cash in, no matter how much I wanted to.  The same is true for you.  If the James Randi Foundation offered you a million dollars to believe that you have no hands, you couldn’t do it.

So what’s left of Christianity?

Some theologians have recognized this dilemma, and rewritten Christianity so that there are two groups — the chosen and the damned.  Ironically, this version of Christianity is plausible, at least insofar as free will goes.   The problem is that such a doctrine doesn’t have the scare power to control the minds of followers.  If I cannot control my own destiny, and am either saved or damned from birth, then I have no particular motivation to do or not do anything at all.

It’s also pretty difficult to reconcile a loving God with a character who would knowingly institute such a system.  What would make such a deity worthy of admiration or worship?  Nothing I can think of.  If man is not free to choose his own eternal destiny, then we have no choice but to place complete responsibility on God for the suffering of millions of humans for all of eternity.

So, on the one hand, we have a God who set up a whole religion around “free will” but forgot to give people genuinely free will.  On the other hand, we have an immensely evil son of a bitch who arbitrarily creates and then eternally torments humans.   Either God is an imbecile or the most evil creature imaginable.

While it’s true that there are a lot of Christian denominations, and each of them has their own take on salvation, this leaves the religion as a whole without much justification for its existence.  Belief in Jesus is not a free choice, so… um…  I guess we should all try to be good to each other, and try to live good lives, and … um…

Doesn’t it seem simpler to just admit that the whole story is kind of goofy, and was made up by Bronze Age men who didn’t understand enough science or philosophy to recognize the absurdity of it all?  Let’s not be glib about this.  Christians are the ones who insist that their entire religion is about salvation and grace, right?  They say, “This is what makes Christianity different from other religions.”   Well, if that’s the case, then a simple thought experiment has just rendered the core essence of Christianity nonsensical.  It doesn’t prove that there’s no god, or that there isn’t a correct religion, but it does prove that if you happen to believe in a religion based upon free will…  YOU ARE WRONG.

 

Oops… I Diddled Again

This is Carrie Prejean, who has recently been dethroned as Miss California.   She sued over the dethroning, but has since dropped the suit.  The whole mess started when she made drama for herself in answering a question about gay marriage:

Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. You know what, in my country, in my family, I think I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.

Meh.

Anyway, Carrie’s been something of a poster-child for the conservative right, and has gone out of her way to make sure everybody knows she’s a good Christian girl.  When she was dethroned, she sued, alleging that it was her Christian beliefs that caused officials to turn on her.  She said they told her she couldn’t mention Jesus at appearances.  Pageant officials had a different story, claiming that she had missed multiple appearances and was becoming increasingly difficult to work with.   (It’s worth noting that Donald Trump publicly defended her after she made the anti-gay remark.)

Anyway…

The whole thing was getting really messy.  Prejean had already racked up well in excess of a hundred thousand in legal fees, and both sides were hunkering down for a multi-year high profile case, and suddenly, the whole thing went away.  Carrie dropped her suit, and the pageant dropped its countersuit, which included money the pageant apparently paid to get bigger boobs for her.

Sheknows.com reports that the reason for this sudden change of tactic was that pageant officials had dug up a video of Carrie masturbating.

Picture this meeting… Prejean enters the conference room with her legal team and her mother. Pageant lawyers start the video, showing a totally nude woman from the waist down having a little private party, if you know what we mean wink wink.

Carrie said the video was disgusting and denied it was her… Until the camera panned up to her face. Busted! The holier-than-thou poster child for the conservative Christian right was caught red-handed in the most compromising of anti-Christian situations.

Whoops.

Carrie says the video was something she made for her boyfriend when she was seventeen.  This isn’t the first time she’s had to defend herself, either.  She also took some heat for a few old modeling photos showing her in less than a Conservative Christian state of dress.  Those photos were attributed to “youthful indiscretions.”  Nevertheless, the legal eagles advised her well.  Pageant contestants are required to sign statements to the effect that they haven’t been photographed nude.  This video counts as being photographed nude.  End of lawsuit.

I imagine there will be a few atheist bloggers who will cite this as another example of right wing hypocrisy, and I suppose they’ll be right.  Rush is a druggie.  Haggard likes cock.   Every Republican congressman has probably had a hooker, or at least an intern.

The thing is, I’m not ok with that approach.  Yes, the conservative Christians are hypocrites.  They like sex, drugs, and rock and roll as much as the rest of us.   The thing is, when we point fingers at them and call them out for hypocrisy, we’re actually validating their absurd moral standards.   You know what? Other than her absurd bigotry towards gays, I’m on Carrie’s side.  I’m sure her boyfriend had a damn fine time masturbating to the video she made for him — and that’s awesome! Yeah… I know… she was seventeen.  But we’re not talking about laws here.  We’re talking about a late teenager who was enjoying her emerging sexuality with a guy.  That’s the way things are supposed to work.

The pageant, however…   That’s another story.  They bought Carrie boobs.  Why?  Because men like to wank off while looking at girls with great boobs. But, it was really important to the pageant that they not promote the idea of women as sex objects, so they made her sign a piece of paper saying she’d never been a bad girl on film.  Even though they paraded her around on stage in front of everybody in this:

So, yeah.  I’m not ok with the pageant’s absurd double standard of enforcing the “good girl” image while simultaneously parading fifty one pieces of sexy meat across the stage.  At the risk of offending my feminist friends (I see you reading, GF…)  I’m perfectly fine with parading pieces of sexy meat across stages.  I just don’t like it when they pretend like they’re not doing what they’re obviously doing, which is selling sex.

Prejean has a book about her trials and tribulations, and I’m sure it’ll read like any one of a dozen in Sarah Palin’s Book of the Month club.  She’s sure she’s being silenced and harassed for her religious beliefs.   In briefly perusing the blogosphere, it appears that a lot of Christians agree.  I honestly don’t know if her ill-advised remarks were the cause of her dethroning.  Maybe so.  I suspect not, though.  I mean, didn’t we just try to elect a woman with exactly the same views to the vice presidency, and didn’t almost half of the country vote for her?

I think this whole situation is a great example of how incredibly screwy humans get when they pretend at Conservative Christian Morality.  The anti-gay remark really doesn’t have much to do with it.  The pageant is pretending like it’s not peddling sex, and the contestants are pretending like they’re not using their bodies to get ahead in the world, and all the guys watching are pretending they hate it, even though they’ll be thinking about Miss California while their slightly pudgy wives go down on them later, even though they don’t like giving oral sex anymore…

Couldn’t we just admit that pretty women get ahead by selling sex?  I think it would be ok if we just admitted that.   It’s almost comical how we dance around the obvious.   Does anybody anywhere actually believe these girls haven’t had lots of wild sex with men who aren’t their husbands?  Does anybody think pageants will be “wholesome” so long as we don’t have video proof that these girls have sex?  Everything in this entire situation comes directly from a bogus moral standard.  Prejean’s anti-gay bigotry, the pageant’s pretense at non-sexuality, the fact that anyone cares that she made a video or that she masturbates — all of this is just moral claptrap, and the whole damn issue would be moot if we as a culture just accepted human sexuality for what it is.

 

Human Nature and Unconscious Natural Selection

Since I began writing about the evolutionary drives behind human behavior and desires, I’ve had various friends and internet friends come to me to ask my opinion on why they or their significant other is feeling the way they feel about a certain situation.  In most cases, it’s pretty easy to make a guess, since most of our dating conflicts come down to a pretty small set of competing drives.

There is one concept that has been difficult to convey in several instances, though.  This is the irrelevance of our conscious motives and desires.  In part, I believe the difficulty stems from our human tendency to elevate our consciousness to some kind of magical status, where we have risen “above the animals,” and have learned to subdue our drives and pursue more “enlightened” activities.

In fact, it is generally accepted across most “human sciences” that our unconscious evolutionary drives are much more involved in our day to day life than we think, and our conscious perceptions can sometimes be more like an interesting veneer on top of the real foundation of our actions.  (I must add the disclaimer that scientists are in far less agreement about specifics of how conscious and unconscious motivations work.  Most good scientists are careful to add disclaimers of their own.)

The example I want to use today is a common source of conflict between men and women in dating situations.   In long term relationships, women often complain that men don’t spend enough time with them, or neglect them.  Men complain that their mates demand too much of their time.  As relationships mature, these complaints tend to escalate.

Explaining this conflict in evolutionary terms is not difficult.  Males who have offspring with multiple females have more offspring, which is an evolutionary win.   Females who get males to devote all or most of their resources to their own offspring score an evolutionary win as well.  These are conflicting goals, and there will naturally be some tension in relationships because of it.  (Remember that these are not the only competing goals, but for the sake of explanation, I’m grossly oversimplifying things.)

David Buss, et al, found that the generalization I made above about men and women’s time demands are true.  Women do become more demanding of their mates’ time, and the effect increases over time.  Men do often feel “trapped” by their mates, and pursue various strategies (poker night, business trips, affairs, etc.) to “get away.”

The thing is, when women are interviewed about this effect, they often say exactly the opposite thing — they want a man who is independent, self-sufficient, and driven at work.   The truth is that women do want those things in a man, but in many cases, they pursue strategies which seem designed to squelch the very things they looked for in the first place.  This is an example of unconscious evolutionary forces working in us.

Remember that emotions are nature’s way of getting us to do things we wouldn’t logically do otherwise.  If you’re a woman, and have ever “smothered” a boyfriend or husband, think about why you did so.  If you’re like most women, you did it because of strong emotional reactions to his absence.  You felt lonely, or anxious, or perhaps his presence was like a drug that gave you an emotional high, and when he was gone, you felt like you needed another “fix.”   You certainly weren’t thinking to yourself:  ”Self, I think it would be a good idea to demand so much of my man’s time that he grows to resent me and tries to get away from me.”  But in many cases, that is exactly what women do in relationships.

Similarly, men often go into relationships with the best of longterm intentions.  They believe they’ve found the one, and they’re committed to changing their philandering ways, “settling down” and raising a family.  Then, as time passes, they slowly slip back into old patterns, and the next thing the poor women know, their men are home one or two nights a week, and have commitments with “the guys” or work so often that it almost seems like they’re single again.

As I read through advice columns and singles magazines while planning this article, I noticed the near ubiquity of the “blame game.”  Men blame women for being insane, irrational, or manipulative when they display smothering behavior.  Women blame men for lacking moral integrity when they don’t maintain the same level of devoted interest they displayed at the beginning of the relationship.  In most cases, the advice experts hand down to both men and women is “Buck up, do what you know you are supposed to do, and stop whining about your emotions.”

In practice, I suppose this is relatively sound advice, especially if children are involved.  However, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for us to practice avoiding the blame game.   The conflicting drives men and women experience in mating relationships are not “character flaws.”  They’re part of what makes us human.  More dramatically, the conflicting drives of males and females are literally the cogs that keep humanity going on the treadmill of evolution.  These competing drives may be inconvenient for us individual humans who are having a hard time in our relationships, but they are an integral part of the mechanism which keeps the superorganism — the species — competitive in the natural environment.

Rather than “fight the system,” I think it’s better to rethink the system.  Rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole, perhaps we can begin to reassess and redefine our goals as committed mating partners, and create environments which minimize the instinctive conflicts which will certainly arise.   More knowledge is more power, and this is just one more example of science showing us the mechanism behind the motivations.  Rather than trying to overcome and “power through” the mechanism, we have the ability to work within the system — “human-ness” — and make informed decisions about what we can realistically expect from ourselves and our mates.