Spiritual Life of an Atheist: The Necessity of Tolerance

I read Sam Harris’s new book, “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values,” the other week, even though I knew I did not agree with much of his thinking in his earlier book, “The End of Faith.”   Being a proud atheist materialist myself, you would think I would have much in common with Harris.  Not so much.*

Harris, like many of the “New Atheists,” is angry, almost to the point of rage.  And when Harris discusses some of the ongoing human atrocities on his mind, I can understand the depth of his anger.  The situation in the Congo is so nightmarish as to be almost incomprehensible, the prevalence of honor killings in the Middle East is horrifying, and the practices of female genital mutilation and religiously justified subjugation are a cause for outrage.  Not only is Harris angry at the ideologies and ideologues that perpetuate these atrocities, he is angry at the secular “moral relativists” he encounters who refuse to condemn them. 

Can killing women who disobey their families’ wishes or mutilating a girl’s capacity for sexual pleasure or forcibly restricting women’s self-expression through identity-obliterating garb or prohibiting girls from obtaining an education be right?  Absolutely not.  These cultural practices are horrifically misguided in their distortion and degradation of women’s capacities and value as individuals.

Is condemning these practices from my seat in the West some sort of cultural imperialism?  I don’t think so.  I feel confident that had I been born into the cultures that practice them, I would have hated their imposition on me and my sister and friends and would have sought to resist them to the extent possible. 

Widely diverse individual variation is a scientific fact.  Indeed, it is the engine of evolution.  As social animals, the tension between the diversity of individual interests and the dictates of human communities is ongoing.  Human communities have answered the problems posed by this tension in an astonishing variety of ways depending on resources, circumstance, tradition, and adaptability.  One of the most significant circumstances that shapes a society’s answer is who ends up in charge.

The beauty of democracy is that it allows (in theory if not always in practice) for individuals as a group, rather than a defined group of individuals, to be in charge.  And because it allows for diversity and changeability, a democracy also requires peaceful tolerance of difference–up to a point.  And that point is generally where the difference inflicts tangible harm on others.

I am confident that my opinion that there is no God is correct but I am tolerant of differing views, as long as those views do not inflict tangible harm on others.  This position is consistent with the fundamental democratic principle of pluralism.  And because I accept the necessity of tolerance in the face of pluralism, I am not so angry at people who peacefully disagree with me, however wrong I might think they are.

Embracing the fact of pluralism and the value of tolerance that underlie democracy is not the same as “moral relativism.”  Not everything goes, even from a tolerant worldview. 

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*My review of The Moral Landscape is at http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/product-reviews/1439171211/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addTwoStar

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of an Atheist: Ode to Our Familiar Canines

My first dog was Spot.  (This is what happens when you allow 5 year olds to name pets.)  He was a black-and-white mutt with some discernible spaniel, who would have been more accurately named “Patches.”  He had been abandoned in our little town and had mange.  But what 5 year old couldn’t look past the hairlessness and disease of a wandering puppy to see the loving companion beneath?  After the due trips to the vet, Spot recovered his hair and became that imagined, if not perfect, companion.

NOVA had a great show on dogs just the other week: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-decoded.html.  I learned several things I hadn’t really grasped before.  Dogs are not just related to wolves–dogs are the same species as wolves.  Their DNA varies by just 0.2% and they can interbreed.  I hadn’t realized that the furry friends I currently share my home with are actually tame wolves–and not just a domesticated wolf-cousin. 

What a difference 0.2% can make.  The NOVA program highlighted an experiment where the scientists tested whether the tameness was caused by nature or nurture.  Nature, hands down.  So clearly nature that at just 4 months old, the lovingly human-raised Canis lupus non-familiaris had to be returned to their wolf pack for everyone’s sake.  The 4-month-old wolf puppies were, in a word, vicious.  Not like Spot at all.

Based on the famous Siberian silver fox experiment, it would appear that the key distinction between our familiar wolves and the wild sort is selection against the trait of aggression.  Although not discussed in this NOVA program, some scientists are now positing that our beloved dogs may have first stepped toward domestication themselves.  (See Nature’s “Dogs That Changed the World, Part I”: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/dogs-that-changed-the-world/introduction/1273/*)  The theory goes something like this: the naturally tamer wolves were able to tolerate closer proximity to humans and gathered around our garbage dumps, separating themselves from their more fearful and, thus, more aggressive litter-mates.  From the courage of a few dogs and piles of human waste was born one of the most unique and mutually fulfilling inter-species relationships.**

NOVA also explained that science is confirming what dog owners have already known–humans and dogs can relate to each other on a deep emotional level.  Dogs can understand our expressions and gestures and we can understand their barks.  Indeed, it appears that dogs’ various barks have developed for the very purpose of communicating with us, as wild wolves have a more limited repertoire.

When the NOVA narrator intones toward the end that “our understanding of how dogs evolved to a whole new level [is] getting us closer to what exactly it means to be tame,” I cannot help but think he is alluding to how our own tameness came to be.

Dogs and humans are both social, formerly wild terrestrial omnivores.  It is not surprising that when we look into each other’s eyes we see some deep recognition across the gulf of the species barrier.  It is this recognition that, I believe, we cherish the most.  To my mind, it softens the edges of the existential aloneness we can feel “out on this stony planet that we farm.”***

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Note on title: The scientific name for dogs is Canis lupus familiaris.

*Dogs are such a popular topic that Nature has had several programs on them. Check them out at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/category/episodes/by-animal/dog/,

** I say “one of the most” in deference to our splendid relationship with cats.  Our historic relationship with the horse also merits recognition.

***From Adrienne Rich’s “Stepping Backward”:

. . .We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm. . .

A copy of the complete poem is available at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stepping-backward/, but I urge you to purchase some of Ms. Rich’s poetry.  A wonderful collection, which includes “Stepping Backward,” is The Fact of a Doorframe.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of an Atheist: A Response to Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind

In her new book, “Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self,” Ms. Robinson expresses more of a critique than an affirmative viewpoint,  although at moments she does hint at several viewpoints she appears to hold: there is a God as understood by at least her Christian tradition; “quantum mind” exists; and human “exceptionalism” invites divine explanation.  Rather than posit–and do the hard work of having to defend–these theses, she merely suggests their truth through her critique of “positivism,” or “reductionist (in the negative sense) materialism,” as exemplified by certain neo-Darwinists, socio-biologists, and evolutionary psychologists.  I have also read widely among these thinkers.  My shelves are lined with books by Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, and Damasio, several of the main targets of her criticisms.  A warning: if yours are not, you may find Ms. Robinson’s book difficult to follow, since it is substantially more about what’s wrong with what they think than what it is exactly she thinks.

In critiquing these science “popularizers,” Ms. Robinson justly states: “[I]t is surely incumbent upon writers who undertake to shape opinion to resist the temptation to popularize in the negative sense of that word.  Vast and contentious literatures lie behind psychology, anthropology, and sociology.  But the popularizers in these fields now are highly regarded figures whom a nonspecialist might reasonably trust to deal competently with the great subjects their books take on, which include human nature and consciousness, and, with striking frequency, religion.”  Having read many of the authors Ms. Robinson targets, I agree that a frequent weakness in their writing is a too certain (almost ideological) presentation of their preferred explanations as established fact and a failure to recognize the continued debate in their fields about the points they prefer to treat as answered.  When reading these authors, one must be careful not to take their word as “gospel,” although that is decidedly (somewhat ironically) how they tend to present it.  But painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. For example, Dennett, a neo-Darwinist philosopher, critiques the same socio-biologist Ms. Robinson does, E.O. Wilson.

Ms. Robinson repeatedly bemoans the preclusion of “metaphysical” thought by the modern scientific (which she seems to define as post-Newton) approach.  At the very end of Chapter 2, “The Strange History of Altruism,” she states: “Our conception of the significance of humankind in and for the universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous.”  Quite true.  But Ms. Robinson’s point seems to be that this fact should not be–that although Copernicus demonstrated over 400 years ago that we are not even the physical focus of our solar system, we should posit ourselves to remain at the teleological center of our vast 13.7 billion-year-old universe. Given the whiffs of “quantum mind,” Ms. Robinson exudes, I would not be surprised if Ms. Robinson is a fan of “biocentrism,” which is more properly denominated “anthropocentrism,” since other complex biological forms such as our beloved best friends, the dog, are not sufficiently cognitively exceptional to justify the universe’s existence by biocentrism’s way of thinking.

Ms. Robinson deigns to grant some “merits in certain circumstances” to positivism’s “exclu[sion] from the model of reality whatever science is (or was) not competent to verify or falsify.”  But she fails to identify which circumstances this positivist exclusion is appropriate for and which not.  I will venture my own opinion–all circumstances external to one’s own most personal sense of one’s self. 

Science is attempting to define that which is situated outside our most personal subjectivity.  In this endeavor, science has even breached the bounds of “the mind,” laying claim to the verifiability of our own self-narratives.  Although Ms. Robinson does not directly address this breach, she clearly disdains it in her dismissal of the neurological explanation of the case of Phineas Gage–the fellow who took a railroad tie through the front of his head in the 1800s and lived to tell about it.  Ms. Robinson suggests that the reported dramatic change in Mr. Gage’s attitude toward the world was due to the ongoing psychological trauma caused by his extensive injury, not the massive physical injury to his brain itself.  And maybe it was.  It is true that the medical technology did not exist in Mr. Gage’s time to properly diagnose his condition.  But Ms. Robinson also cannot disprove that a brain scan today may have indicated massive damage to the part of his brain responsible for control of emotion.  Further evidence of the fundamentally biological nature of Mr. Gage’s new behavioral and attitudinal challenges may have been provided by the failure of modern therapeutic techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, to improve Mr. Gage’s functioning in any measure. 

It would be lovely to think, as Ms. Robinson seems to, that the mind has executive control over its own matter, but it does not–and the evidence for devastatingly physical causes for many cognitive and emotional impairments (Alzheimer’s is just one example) is irrefutable.  So, for example, while a person with Alzheimer’s may attribute their mental decline to any number of causes, a brain scan will reveal its true, and at this time untreatable and intractable, source.

Ms. Robinson spends the entire Chapter 3 on “The Freudian Self,” which is of at best purely historical interest as Freudian theories of human psychology and culture are largely discredited. And I think Ms. Robinson is being generous when she states that Freud rightly claimed the mantle of “scientist” for himself by the prevailing standards of his day.  Neither Freud nor Jung was very “scientific” in their methods–using themselves and their limited client populations as foundations for grand universal theories about human nature.  Ms. Robinson’s interest in Freud is most likely literally academic, as virtually no one outside the academy pays Freud any attention anymore.  So, unless you have some particular interest in understanding Freud in a briefly sketched historical context, skip Chapter 3 altogether.

Last, Ms. Robinson claims for “the religious” an experience that even an avowed atheist like myself has deeply felt: “For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently.”  The poetic beauty of Ms. Robinson’s expression of individual yearning cannot be denied and should not be devalued, despite her inexplicable attribution to it of “religious” significance, as if atheist materialists such as myself are not haunted by such yearnings to live more authentically than our daily imperatives allow.

To state that I am an atheist materialist does not mean that I eschew all sense of the “spiritual.”  As I have explained in my blog, awe and aspiration are not the exclusive property of believers.  In response to Ms. Robinson, to that list it appears I should add “longing” as well.

You can watch Ms. Robinson discuss her book with Jon Stewart at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-8-2010/marilynne-robinson.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: Fear and Clothing in the 21st Century

Friday morning I emerged from the BART station to several emptied city blocks, yellow police tape marking off areas, and a bomb squad truck parked in front of the building directly across the street from my office building.  I was unnerved.  My building had not been evacuated and, although reluctant to do so, I went into my building and to work.  An email from building management was circulated explaining that police were investigating a “suspicious package” somewhere in the vicinity and recommending that “the occupants of buildings surrounding the area remain inside and stay away from the windows.”  As one of the perks of my job is having an exterior office with two windows that make up the entire outside wall, staying away from the windows was not a possibility.  Thankfully, the situation resolved without incident.  It appears to simply have been an abandoned suitcase full of clothes—as strange as that is. http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Police-close-off-intersection-downtown-due-to-suspicious-package-106312843.html

I’m not especially fearful of terrorism, even though I keep up with the news and am aware of the recurring incidents in the U.S. by paranoid “patriots,” disgruntled workers, murderous “pro-lifers,” random angry people, and violent jihadists.  Twice a day every work day, I’m on the BART train, a potentially high-profile target with no discernible security, and since the initial shock of 9/11 wore off years ago, I never think about the terrorist risk.  When I fly, I worry more about windshear or equipment failure or bad weather or simple human error than bombs. 

Our contingent world is uncertain and full of risks.  Our climate is dynamic, resulting in the episodic extremes of droughts and storms.  Active geologic processes support the Earth’s surface, causing volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis.  We are potential host to various other mostly microscopic life forms that cause illness and death.  More rarely, we fall prey to other animals.  Natural and man-made toxins abound.  Our own bodily processes breakdown and fail.  We are not guaranteed but have to labor for food and shelter.  Accidents happen.  And we are subject to the malice of others.  To boot, we are more aware of our chancy circumstances than any other animal.

Our innate response to the risk of uncertainty is fear.  We don’t all fear everything the same.  For each of us, some risks are more salient than others.  Some people are scared to drive (less common, more rational); some people are scared to fly (more common, less rational); some people are especially concerned about germs (germaphobes); some people are especially affected by the foreignness of man-made toxins (environmental sensitivity); some people are scared of man’s best friend, while some can’t abide cats; and some people are terrified of heights—even despite their best efforts to overcome (including me).

Our tribal hunter-gatherer brains evolved to cope with many fewer and different risks than we face today in our industrialized, globalized world.  And our assessment of risk necessarily starts, and often ends, on the gut level.  For those of us of a more rational bent, some attempt at calculation may come into play, but no individual can have access to enough information or computing power to actually calculate out all the risks she faces every day.  And knowledge of overall probabilities does not provide very strong predictive power for the individual case anyway. 

So we all have to use heuristics, learned rules of thumb, for navigating the ubiquitous uncertainty inherent in our otherwise crazy-making world.  Often these rules of thumb are so ingrained in us, they are unconscious.  Some rules of thumb are more accurate and/or useful than others.  The least accurate ones we call “superstitions” these days.  The persistence of personal superstitions in our modernized society is a testament to the emotional power of our rules of thumb.  To do this day, I cannot bring myself to speak good fortune aloud without the fear of “jinxing” it.   Resisting this superstition is so emotionally uncomfortable that I have stopped trying.

Fear is necessary but unless controlled very limiting.  The broader and less accurate our restrictive rules of thumb are the more circumscribed and less vivid our life experience is.  When we cling to our untested prejudices, we prevent ourselves from authentically encountering the fantastic assortment of activities, places, and people that make up our world. 

The variety I get to experience from my little vantage point here on the “Left Coast” is impressive.  I live in a neighborhood of teachers, carpenters, mailmen, contractors, architects, business consultants, computer technicians, and lawyers, straight and gay, religious (there is a Samoan Mormon church at the top of my street) and not (at least me, but I am sure there are others), white, black, Asian, and Latino.  My commuter train is filled with an even greater array of people—many speaking languages I cannot identify, nevermind understand.  Any day I can choose to eat Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Brazilian, Ethiopian/Eritrean, West African, or Indian/Pakistani food.  I daily see people dressed in any manner of garb—business suits (lots of those), dastaars, taqiyahs, headscarves, batiks, tie dye, modern primitive, urban youth, the threadbare patchwork uniform of chronic homelessness. 

The other night I got to commune with an earlier time in our own history, watching Bela Lugosi as Dracula in a beautifully restored art deco theater, with an authentic news reel from that same year (1931) describing Lindbergh’s first commercial flight in an amphibious plane to South America, Babe Ruth dressing up as Santa and giving away food 2 years into the Great Depression, and Hitler’s rise to “the Mussolini of Germany.”  To do so, I had to “brave” downtown Oakland, a neighborhood many people I work with are too scared of to ever visit.

I am at most a three-hour drive from almost any conceivable activity—skiing in the Sierras, hiking in the redwoods, sailing on the Pacific, kayaking in a slough with scoops of pelicans and rafts of sea otters, white-water rafting down Class 3 rapids, viewing sandhill cranes in the Central Valley or gray whales by the Farallon Islands or elephant seals at Ano Nuevo beach.  Someday I hope to drum up the courage to cage dive with the great whites that favor our coast—a task made more difficult by my exposure to Jaws at an early age.

Variety entails uncertainty.  We are often initially ill at ease with the unfamiliar because we don’t have any rules of thumb to gauge risk by.  We latch onto whatever impressions we have—however meager their factual basis may be.  The biases we bring to bear tend to shape our perception of our experience.  If we are prone to think of young African-American males as menacing, we may tend to see the young man on the street corner at night talking loudly with his friends as a threat, and our bias confirms itself.      

The more rein we give to our unverified heuristics, the more we are like the people shackled in Plato’s mythic cave—seeing only shadows of reality and not reality itself.  My recommendation is that the next time you are on a plane, if you happen to be seated next to someone in foreign-seeming attire, consider it a privilege and say, “Hello.”  You never know what you will learn.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: What Makes Us Human

That we are unique among animals is clear.  Somehow our consciousness developed a complexity that allowed us to craft a remarkable diversity of cultures, transform our environments to better suit our needs and colonize the world, from tropical jungles to arid deserts to arctic tundra.  We don’t know how our complex consciousness came to be.  But it is fundamentally what distinguishes us from other animals.  With it have come the language, imagination and abstract reasoning that have fueled the astounding advance of our knowledge and technologies.  Our capacity for complex, reasoned thought is our hallmark difference from other animals. 

At the other end of the spectrum, our capacity to feel distinguishes our consciousness from mechanical intelligence.  Life is so multi-variate and contingent, we could not as a factual matter depend on reason alone to make judgments and decisions. The science of the critical role of feeling in decision-making is strong. So, a key to our humanness is the complex web of reasoning/feeling that constitutes our living consciousness. 

This web of reasoning/feeling includes a moral capacity.  Evolution imbued us with a “moral sense.”  We are hard-wired to experience emotions like approval and disgust, pride and shame and appear to have a built-in intuition for fairness, wanting to reward behavior we feel is equitable and punish behavior we feel is not. Our hard-wired emotional, intuitive moral capacity is built upon by culture and moral reasoning, with which we ponder and attempt to answer and enforce our answers to complicated questions of morality.   

The fact that our moral capacity is a distinguishing feature is captured in the Genesis tale of our banishment from the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Having transcended the naïve state of other social animals, we are destined to struggle with existential questions.

“What is moral” is one of the most contested questions there is.   Reasonable minds can differ, but like other areas of our knowledge, our moral knowledge has improved over time.  In much of the world, we no longer criminalize interpersonal transgressions such as adultery, execute people in the public square for any reason, or condone chattel slavery.  We have discovered a far better mix of order, liberty and equality than in the past, becoming more “humane” as a result.

The cornerstone of our increasing humaneness is our willingness to attempt to relate to each other despite apparent differences, to recognize that humans are all alike in certain fundamental ways (e.g., that we all value our own lives and liberty and want to pursue our own happiness), and to agree to treat each other based on that recognition.  

We are reasoning/feeling, moral animals emerged through evolution from a naïve state, destined to struggle with the consequences and conundrums that necessarily result from our unique condition.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: The Astounding Advance of Knowledge

Modern humans came into existence between 130,000 to 250,000 years ago.  Only five thousand or so years ago, we were just discovering how to write.  Today, we can see to the edge of the visible universe—some 13 billion light-years.*    So in this most recent fraction of our existence, our knowledge has expanded exponentially.  The acquisition of our wide-ranging knowledge has been hard-earned—an incremental, uneven process of persistent, collective effort.  In the developed world, we are daily steeped in the products of our knowledge, and for the most part, we are not taught and do not think much about the history of our knowledge.  We tend to take our present ever-advancing state of knowledge for granted.  We should not.

After all my years of formal education were done, one afternoon in a used bookstore, I chanced upon a book I remembered from my mother’s bookshelf of my childhood—Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself.  Its placement of knowledge itself in an historical context literally changed the way I saw the world.  The study of our acquisition of knowledge is a fascinating and valuable endeavor, helping us understand how it is we have come to know so much.      

During the course of our existence, our brains evolved powerful intuitive ways of relating to the world.  But in the last five thousand years, the hallmark of our species has been the gradual cultural retraining of our cognitive capacity toward investigated and tested knowledge, rather than intuition or belief.**  This mass retooling of our native cognitive bent toward a scientific and rationalist worldview is at the heart of our culture wars.  It has occurred because science and reason produce results—better infrastructure, longer life-spans, entertaining gadgets.  Barring catastrophe, the scientific, rationalist approach will continue its expansion and dominance over non-rationalist gestalts.

But, not to get apocalyptic, catastrophe cannot be ruled out—in part due to knowledge’s advance.  At the moment, our inventiveness seems to be outstripping our ability to foresee and mitigate its destructive consequences in several domains, such as our energy and weapons technologies. And we have good reason for concern that the same could prove true for our nascent genetic technologies.*** 

Although religious fundamentalists of all stripes partake in the benefits of our scientific advances, they are at war against knowledge.  They deny what science has taught us about human nature and the construction of human cultures and want to turn back the growing global recognition of human rights.  In the United States, they want to destroy secular, public education.  Many of them are also global climate change deniers who reject what science tells us about the consequences of carbon-based energy.  Shockingly, a self-righteous select fervently advocate an apocalyptic future.

That knowledge has a downside is unquestionable.  The solution is not to retreat from its power but to understand and respect it and to consciously and constructively harness and redirect it.  While secularization is directly opposed to religious fundamentalism, it bears no conflict at all with an inspired embrace of positive values.  We must guide scientific inquiry and the advance of knowledge with the best human values—compassion, moderation, humility.  

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*The consensus among historians is that writing arose for the first time around 3,500-3,000 B.C. in the Near East.  (J.M. Roberts, A Short History of the World, Oxford University Press (1993), pp. 35, 42-34; Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, The New Press (2007), pp. 95-97.) Regarding the remarkable range of modern telescopes, see Nova’s fantastic program, “Hunting the Edge of Space, Part 1” at http://video.pbs.org/video/1456686369/. 

** Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, The Belknap Press of Harvard University (2007) provides an in-depth treatment of the historical transformation to a fundamentally secular worldview.

***One could also voice concern about potential unintended consequences of artificial intelligence and cyborg technologies.  As long as these technologies are not self-replicating, my personal judgment is that they pose fewer concerns.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: Managing the Downside of the Two-Sided Human Coin

As crazy as it sounds given the 24/7 bad news cycle, my heart harbors visions of human perfectability.  I catch sight of it in common moments of courtesy in the crush of a morning train, in the sublime recapitulation of a symphony, or in the tireless curiosity of a child.  My head talks me down from these flights with a bracing dose of what I know to be Janus-faced human nature.  An overgrown, yet neotinized ape, we are a predator with an evolved capacity for empathy.  At once loving and suspicious, cooperative and selfish, sentimental and coldly calculating, noble and vain.  Our minds can grasp so much but maintain a superstitious bent and are predisposed to misperceive risk and reward—sometimes catastrophically. 

Science provides evermore support for the proposition that human nature is a two-sided coin.  Just last week, Science Magazine published the results of a study that correlated intergroup aggression with oxytocin, the “love” hormone linked to orgasm, maternal bonding, romantic attachment, and intragroup trust (not to be confused with OxyContin, the designer opioid).  (See Carsten K.W. De Dreu, et al., “The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans, Science 328, 1408 (2010), available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5984/1408.)  Of course, we protect what we love from perceived threat—violently if necessary.  When threat is misperceived, love itself can be perverted into an agent of destruction.

Some speak of humans as a virus, a blight on our beautiful island in the vast ocean of Space.  And since we made our “Great Leap Forward” cognitively and culturally around 50,000 years ago, we have left an ever-growing wake of waste and environmental destruction.  As the apex predator, we are our own worst enemy, with our domestic, ethnic, religious, and inter-nation violence.  I see all this—our terrible downside—and I still love us, a bit like a parent loves their imaginative, unruly child.

We did not fall from a state of grace.  We emerged from a state of nature just 50,000 or so years ago, imperfect but with a lot of promise.  Human perfectability is a mirage, but human improvement is not.  It requires that we acknowledge and actively manage our downside, that we consciously cultivate the better angels of our nature.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

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Other References

Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Harper Perennial (2006). (http://www.geog.ucla.edu/people/faculty.php?display_one=1&lid=3078&modify=1)

Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Henry Holt (2004). (http://www.helenfisher.com/)

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: The Incredibly Improbable and Wondrous Occurrence of Life

The miracle of life.  We understand the mechanisms of life—cellular structure, DNA, RNA, metabolism, reproduction—and we are pretty confident that all life on Earth (as we know it) evolved from the same single-celled organism existing at least 3.5 billion years ago.  (That there may be other simple forms of life on Earth not yet detected because we don’t know what to look for is an open question.  See Paul Davies, “The Aliens Among Us,” NYTimes, 5/13/10, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/opinion/14davies.html?scp=2&sq=second+life&st=nyt.)  But, despite all the recent press about the “invention of artificial life,” we have not yet fabricated life anew, nor stimulated the spontaneous occurrence of life.  (For a discussion of the state of “synthetic” or “artificial” life, see Natalie Angier, “Peering Over the Fortress That Is the Mighty Cell,” NYTimes, 5/31/10, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01angi.html?scp=3&sq=synthetic%20life&st=cse; Olivia Judson, “Baby Steps to New Life-Forms,” NYTimes, 5/27/10, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/baby-steps-to-new-life-forms/?scp=6&sq=second%20life&st=cse.)

We are pretty certain the Universe itself was created in the Big Bang (you can see evidence of it in the portion of snow cosmic background radiation creates on an open television channel) but not so certain how life first emerged.  Since we have not yet succeeded in recreating life, and life itself has not generated anew on Earth, some scientists posit that the living seed of Earth’s magnificent life tree actually originated elsewhere.  Panspermia.  In this strong form, the panspermia theory begs rather than answers the question of how life, as opposed to life on Earth, began.

The advances of modern science have not left too many places for God to dwell, so it is natural that theists look for God in this knowledge gap about the creation of life.  Not being of a believing bent myself, I see an unanswered question, and I draw lessons from what we do know about life, not what we don’t.

The first thing we know is that the occurrence of life is rare.  In the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence it has happened once (putting aside the possibility of simple forms of “aliens” among us).  And whatever other life may be out there in the Universe, other complex, intelligent beings are likely very distant from us, perhaps unbridgeably so.

We also know that every living thing on Earth is a descendant of that single, initial organism and its wondrous “life spark.”  The notion that we are all interconnected is not New Age nonsense, but scientific fact.  Some scoff at the idea that humans evolved from apes, never mind that all land animals evolved from fish.  Reality is that all animals, including fish, evolved from plants.  Before any animal came into being, Earth was the dominion of plants, which in fact are the source of the air animals breathe.*  Each of us, each living thing, is a torch bearer in an at least 3.5 billion-year-long relay carrying an inherited flame tracing back to the germinal ember of the original living cell.

And while not all life thinks or feels, all life perceives and strives—toward energy sources and away from obstacles.  On this most basic level, we can relate to even the most rudimentary forms of life.

Because our planet is especially suited to life (due in part to its particular distance from and stable orbit around the Sun and its low mass, rapid rotation and moderate axial tilt), the striving spark of life has manifested itself over the eons in a truly astonishing diversity of evermore complex forms.

Every one of these multifarious lives will die.  Entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) pretty much dictates it.

So, life as we know it is rare, diverse, finite, and literally shares in the same striving spark.

Living creation is a wonder to know and behold, even if one does not believe God into the gap.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Other References

Fred Adams, Origins of Existence: How Life Emerged in the Universe, The Free Press (2002) (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/umich/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=aca1ed24e4516110VgnVCM1000009db1d38dRCRD&vgnextchannel=350e6b0ae62fd110VgnVCM100000a3b1d38dRCRD)

Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, The New Press (2007) (http://www.dominican.edu/dominicannews/dominican-professor-examines-big-history.html)

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Houghton Mifflin (2004) (http://www.richarddawkins.net/)

Giancarlo Genta, Lonely Minds in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Copernicus Books (2007) (http://www.giancarlogenta.it/)  

*And see Chad Upton, “The Three Plants You Should Have Inside Your Home,” at http://brokensecrets.com/2010/06/04/the-three-plants-you-should-have-inside-your-home/, for tips on using plants to provide clean air in your home.

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: Right and Wrong in a Godless World

“A godless world.”  It has the ring of an epithet, even to my unbelieving ears.  One imagines an obscured sun over a desolate landscape, lawlessness and depravity, something out of McCarthy’s The Road, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or a Soviet gulag perhaps.  But the world I inhabit is in fact godless, and it is nothing like that.  It is the same world in which believers dwell.  The rain falls and the sun shines on believer and non-believer alike.

Right and wrong do not lapse along with faith.  Morality and ethics are not dependent upon belief in a celestial Watchmaker or punishment in an afterlife.  There is mounting scientific evidence that our brains are hard-wired with an intuitive moral sense, which may start to kick in as early as infancy.  (See, e.g., Paul Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,” NYTimes Magazine, 5/3/10, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?scp=1&sq=morality%20and%20children&st=cse)  Humans are social animals.  Our individual survival, and ability to reproduce, are dependent upon our relationship with the group.  As social animals, we have to have rules for interacting with each other, coordinating efforts and distributing resources.  We can see such incipient moral senses in other social animals.  Evolution, not God, has designed our individual but social minds with an inherent moral capacity.

For very good evolutionary reasons, our native moral capacity is decidedly within-group based.  One can see this in religious belief itself.  Given the near universality of religious belief among human cultures, one can be fairly certain that the “godless heathen” was not irreligious at all but a believer in a different, likely equally jealous God.   Because religious belief is most often a social glue within a group, it is also often a barrier between groups, a tribal remnant that can promote hatred of the quite human other.  If we seek vengeance for our group, we are firm in our belief that our bloody hand grips God’s just sword.   

It is true that once belief in God falls away, one has to do a lot more thinking for oneself to establish right and wrong.  But belief does not necessarily lead one upon a right path, and atheists are not all fallen Dostoyevsky characters.    The Golden Rule it turns out is a demonstrably good idea that has been derived in somewhat different formulations by numerous traditions.  Values determine our character, not belief.  Integrity, compassion and cooperation are truly their own reward, in this life–in part because they foster trust.  No belief in the supernatural is required to dedicate oneself to them.  All one has to do is look around and see how their practice improves the world—and their absence creates an all too real race to the bottom and quite literal living hells.

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

Other References:

Frans De Waal, Our Inner Ape, Riverhead Books (2005) (http://www.psychology.emory.edu/nab/dewaal/)

Frans De Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton University Press (2006)

Len Fisher, Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008) (http://www.lenfisher.co.uk/)

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, HarperCollins (2006) (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/HauserBio.html)

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin Group (2002) (http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/)

Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, Times Books (2004) (http://www.michaelshermer.com/)

Spiritual Life of An Atheist: Why Not God?

For me, the short answer is that while I was born in Louisiana it is as if I was raised in Missouri—the “Show Me State.”  I have never seen any signs of a supernatural conscious force, for good or ill, at work in the world.  The stories they try to make you believe were simply unbelievable to me, and which God was I to believe in?  Once I knew there was more than one God available to worship, how was I to choose, other than by the cultural accident of my birth?  (If one looks across time and culture, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of gods and even versions of the same nominal god to choose from.  For instance, the Judeo-Christian “God” has changed, and diverged, significantly over time.)  

Other learned people have resolved these quandaries in favor of religious belief, but I could not.  Nor have I felt any need to, as both my curiosity about creation and my ethical values have found ample support in reason and fact.  The good news is I don’t believe you’re going to hell if you don’t agree with me.

Creation and the explanation for it are quite grand, even without belief in an Unmoved Mover.  Around 13.7 billion years ago an immensely dense singularity exploded, creating the Universe we inhabit.  The physical laws that guide our Universe did not exist until moments after the Big Bang itself.  Therefore, we do not, and perhaps cannot, know the causes or conditions of the moment of the Big Bang or before.  But what does seem certain is that the processes the Big Bang set in motion were ordered but unfeeling.  Four fundamental forces interacted with subatomic particles, which formed elements and then stars and then planets.  On our planet in one corner of the immensely vast Universe, the conditions were right for the formation of complex life forms and out of the millions of types of complex life forms on Earth emerged, through the indifferent process of natural selection, one species with the capacity to eventually understand the nature of the Universe it inhabits.  Us, of course.  Humans.  Homo sapiens sapiens.   An extraordinary story in its own right that, when fully appreciated, does not need the embellishment of miracles or magic or such.

Our ability to apprehend the Universe in which we live and who we are in it has been hard-earned through common effort over millennia.  Initially, religious institutions fostered the literacy and structured inquiry necessary to acquire this knowledge.  But, as the histories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin illustrate, religious belief and institutions became barriers to the advance of knowledge, as that knowledge challenged factually incorrect dogma.

Contemporary anti-religionists tend to focus on the terrible violence that has been committed in the name of religion, and certainly that tragic list is long and bloody.  Quite unfortunately, religious belief appears to be more the proximate than the ultimate cause of mass human violence.  We fight and scheme and kill over many things—religion is just one item on the list.  But, to the extent religious belief inhibits honest and rigorous inquiry into scientific and ethical questions, it is now the principal obstacle to the further advance of human knowledge.

In the end, for me, why not God?  Because we are unique in our capability to know, and I want to know far more than to believe.

(A fine example of the obstacle religious belief poses to knowledge is the religious outcry over the “invention of artificial life” announced last week.  (See, e.g., http://jonvaala.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/scientists-create-first-artificial-life/)  There are many important questions to ask about the implications and use of this new technology, but none of those questions involve “God.”  To my mind, the most pressing initial concern is sorting out the problem of potential unintended consequences.  Invoking “God” does not further, indeed impairs, that effort.  The danger is not godless science, but short-sighted, hubristic and profit-driven science.)  

copyright 2010 S. Anne Johnson

References:

Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine Books (1993)

Fred Adams, Origins of Existence, The Free Press (2002)

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Alfred A. Knopf (2005)

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin (2004)