This Saturday I’m attending the Reason Rally in Washington D.C. – I’ve been putting together thoughts about why the pursuit of knowledge and the application of reason are so important, and so here they are, imperfect as they may be. In all honesty, you’d probably be better served by skipping the essay and just reading Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience instead, but here goes nothing:
It must be recognized that some people do harm others. While many of us live sheltered lives, enjoying the in-group homeostasis that middle to upper class living affords, anyone who has been unlucky enough to require the services of law enforcement or hospitals or other such operators knows that there are chaotic elements in society. It is possible to imagine a utopia with global harmony, however it seems that for a long, long time we will be forced to reckon with the consequences of primal instinct, deleterious delusions, true psychopaths, and other random factors which will demand the counter-efforts of clear thinking and peaceful citizens, and when necessary the application of brief and controlled force.
When human beings act on beliefs that cause suffering, those of us who are aware of the injustice, even if only self-destructive on the part of the actor, must attempt to raise awareness of the situation, and present better options. At times this can only be done with the application of bitter truth. We must all be educators, and lead by example to behave more ethically and to be good global citizens. If a person cannot, and their actions interfere with the rights of others, they should be made responsible or otherwise controlled. This should be uncontroversial, as it is the foundation of our criminal justice system.
It is difficult for me to openly level criticism at religions or their members who, with the rest of us, are often doing the best they know how to get through the marvelously challenging experience of living, but very often “the best they know how” is not the same as “the best way.” There is a great deal of suffering caused by dogmatic belief, and it too must be recognized and countered. Some religious organizations have allowed themselves to be educated and reformed by the slow influence of scientific understanding and the rise of universal, and secular, human values. Some have not.
I recently attended an event hosted by an Episcopal church, where a self-described gnostic Christian presented a group of interested church-goers with information about the Ali-Forney Center, a non-profit working to help homeless LGBT youth – and not by conversion! This was a sex-positive, culturally sensitive presentation which placed no judgement whatsoever on the homeless child. That they may have resorted to drug-use, sex work, or otherwise self-destructive behavior for survival made no difference. They are human children, and deserve our love and attention. Such a thing would be unthinkable in a Catholic church.
Our presenter told a story with which I was already familiar, of Covenant House, a Catholic run homeless shelter in NYC which has been criticized for poor oversight, with a number of abuses – physical, psychological, and sexual – reported. LGBT youth are disproportionately more likely to be counted among the homeless due to their poor-excuse-for-family members kicking them to the curb upon coming out, and so these children turned to what was then the only game in town, Covenant House, which only served to turn its Catholic dogmas upon them, expecting that they renounce their orientation or face damnation. Is this what a terrified, shell-shocked homeless child needs to hear? Will this be constructive to their self-image and re-introduction to society? Of course not. Every modern, factual understanding of human psychology and well-being would bear this out. Yet the fundamental flaws at the very heart of the Catholic institution have remained largely unchallenged, simply because until recently, few people cared to pay attention to what was happening. Catholicism could reform, but it seems unlikely. At present, they have only entrenched their most extreme stances.
So here you see a dichotomy between two organizations which shared a common origin in Christianity. One became open to new ideas and adopted more peaceful and productive ways of understanding the world, the other did not. Rigidity is not the same as strength, as any good engineer will tell you.
And so I came upon some excellent criteria for a healthy worldview, which any religious organization would do well to adopt.
In a debate organized by Oxford University, The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and biologist and author Richard Dawkins, spoke with philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny about the nature of human beings and their origins. Overall the tone of the debate was pleasant and conversational, however before Kenny allowed either interlocutor to progress too far into their arguments, he asked the following question:
“I’d like to make sure we do agree on very simple things. That is, that the three of us all believe in truth. Namely that there is such a thing as objective truth and it’s not just an ideological construct…secondly that we all believe in logic, that is, that we think that if two statements flatly contradict each other they can’t both be true, and thirdly that we all believe in science, that we think it is one of the greatest of human achievements and that we all owe the scientists of many generations a great debt of gratitude for the way in which they have improved the world. Is there any dissent to that?”
There was fortunately no objection of any kind, to what I thought was a rather grand proposal. Were there to have been protest, it might have come from the relativists, who would claim that truth is a construct of human culture, and has no larger meaning outside the bubble of our species. To this I say, let us leave thought experiments aside, and for the purposes of this essay agree that if you were to threaten to drop a bowling ball on my foot, and I quoted Zeno’s Paradox back to you explaining why such an action would be impossible, I would still find myself howling in pain after our experiment was run. At least let us agree that should there be evidence which supports relativism, it might merely suggest a relationship with reality akin to Newton’s laws of motion, which function well under everyday circumstances, but less so at the level of the very small or the very fast. We are here interested in what’s observable.
Still, another objection might have arisen from they who doubt that science has improved society as much as is claimed. They might suggest that despite the advancements of our ‘information age’, we have not become a gentler species, or improved the world so dramatically that the benefits have outweighed the costs. To this objector I would say that you are free to get into your time machine and return to whatever era you wish, and leave us to live in a world that has the lowest rates of violence, the highest life expectancies and happiness, and the most personal freedom, comfort, and respect for human dignity beyond historical barriers of race and gender that our species has ever enjoyed. Fare thee well, and enjoy the human sacrifices, the cat burnings, the cholera, and the crusades.
I believe that anyone who would object to the above criteria could rightfully be called ignorant or worse. Such a person might be so slippery as to utter the maxim “what may be true for you may not be true for me.” If you make this statement you’re not talking about objective truth; you’re talking about subjective experience.
Why do I believe so strongly that Sir Kenny’s three maxims are important and central to a healthy worldview?
Seeing as we do live in the ‘information age’, I believe that it is important to arm ourselves with information. Ideas are flowing more freely across geographical, political, and cultural boundaries than at any other time in history. So freely do the ideas flow, and so powerful are the ideas, that regimes whose power rests on ignorance, propaganda, and fear have sought to block their spread.
So when I see individuals claiming or wielding power that has been derived by taking advantage of the ignorance of others, or when I see them acting on beliefs that have no factual support from any of the sciences, I get upset. You would too if, for example, you were a woman and a man tried to “put you in your place” because it was biblically ordained, or if you were a parent whose child had been beaten at school because they were perceived to be gay, or if a doctor gave you a pill for your ailment that you later discovered had no ingredient other than sugar.
Today, many, many people live out their lives believing in the truth of outdated or unsubstantiated maxims, superstitions, or flat out falsehoods. I’m quite sure a number of these still influence me, but the difference is in the classic Socratic definition of wisdom, in knowing you don’t know, and seeking to become better educated about the facts. I do occasionally wonder if the reason some people fear education and new ideas, or regard intelligence as “elitist”, is simply so they can continue to behave irrationally or carelessly and claim not to know better. [Side Note: Additionally, given the present challenges to the notion of free-will, it is ironic that such people would blindly reject these arguments from ignorance, thus perpetuating a pattern of behaviour which limits them from expressing a range of choices which could be more “free-will-like.”]
It was concurrent with the Age of Reason or Enlightenment in the 18th century that human civilization saw a dramatic downturn in barbaric behavior, or phrased positively, saw a dramatic increase in empathy. It was the secular writings and ideas of great thinkers and scientists like David Hume and Thomas Paine that laid the foundation for an increase in education, the proliferation of Universities, and the pursuit of scientific study which gave the whole of humanity a better understanding of our natural world and each-other.
The more the scientific method did its thing, the more gaps were filled in our mosaic of understanding. For every superstition, a new experiment showed its inadequacy as an explanation for anything. All of this came despite the religious institutions of the day, which enjoyed enormous power and operated more as governments than simply churches, looking with suspicion on any activity that would cast doubt on their infallibility. At the time, the Church with a capital “C” was the North Korea of today.
“The Earth is the center of the Universe!” says the Church.
“No it’s not” says Galileo.
“Well ok…” says the Church, “…but the heavens were created in 6 days! And we’re still infallible!”
“No they weren’t, and no you’re not.” Says the geologist, the physicist, the biologist, et al.
“Well OK…” says the Church, “…but God spun it all into being way back when, and by the way, still infallible!”.
“That doesn’t seem very likely…” says Darwin et al., “… and no, you’re not! Stop saying you’re infallible! How many times can you guys (and you certainly are all ‘guys’) claim a special understanding of God and yet make so many mistakes?! Shouldn’t you be performing better than the rest of us?”
If for no other reason, the claims of all religions should be recognized as ridiculous simply because they are patriarchal, with each and every single one, even Buddhism, elevating men above women. Why more women aren’t outraged by this is beyond me.
“The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God. I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.”
-Elizabeth Candy Stanton
I’m sure I have not made my position quite clear by this point, and so fortunately it has been made succinctly by Professor Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. I paraphrase him as follows:
Faith-based processes are unreliable and unlikely to lead one to the truth, whereas the scientific method has been the only process historically shown to reliably produce results that have eased the suffering of sentient beings.
It is no secret that humanity exhibits some rather strange behavior when beliefs are not aligned with objective reality. Cults are formed this way. Pseudosciences like astrology and homeopathy flourish when kept outside the spotlight of real science. Many mental illnesses are encouraged, even defined, by humans who adopt unreliable or untrue beliefs about reality, and act from those false assumptions. But one area where we give delusion a pass is in beliefs related to a God or Gods.
It is possible for someone to say “I prefer Bach and you prefer Beethoven. You cannot prove that one is better than the other. Therefore if I believe in this kind of a God and if you do not, you cannot say I’m right or wrong in this belief.” However these axioms are not equal. One is a claim about subjective experience, the other is a claim about objective reality.
We do agree that we can both hear Bach and Beethoven, and that we cannot judge each other’s subjective experience of the music. We know that sound, and thus music, is a pressure wave which is received by our body, translated by the brain, and can be shown to produce certain effects in human beings. We can also discover by comparing our anatomy that we are likely hearing the same notes in the same way, and we can repeat to each other vocally the melody and pitch to know that it is the same. I’m not hearing “da da dum” and you’re actually hearing “do do do.” But it is true that the notes may have a different effect on our moods, and what may cause elation in one may cause boredom in another, or cathartic anger in one and painful frustration in another, depending on the genre.
There are all kinds of sounds, most of which simply allow for sensory awareness of our surroundings. But some sounds are special. Some sounds carry complex information, such as language, and we have evolved to manipulate sound to our benefit and store the information in our brains. Music, when it is lyrical and tells a story, can be language as well. However, instrumental music particularly may be rather like a drug.
Most fauna evolved to consume organic matter as fuel (food) and discard best they could that which wasn’t useful (waste). Some compounds, such as psychedelic drugs, are not quite fuel, but not quite waste, and produce rather unpredictable effects in the body. The plants which produce these compounds did not evolve specifically to induce these effects in humans, but their toxicity was likely a reaction to predation by our ancestors, and so being curious and resourceful, humans learned to make use of them when we wished.
Similarly, hearing and vocalization developed as a useful tool to provide sensory awareness of our surroundings, and to communicate, but we also found that if we produced certain sounds in certain ways, they resulted in unanticipated and often delightful effects. Changes in brain chemistry relating to mood have been shown to happen in the presence of certain kinds of music. Few other animals truly produce music, that is sound for its own sake, and bird or whale ‘song’ are all really forms of talking which we romanticize and happen to find melodic, and that’s fine.
So we can say a great deal about music, and there is quite a lot for science to study, test, and comment on. But this is the crucial point – we can both hear the music. We can, independently of one another, record it with a microphone, and if we’re ambitious, learn an instrument and play the piece ourselves.
But what can we really know of God? When a person says they know God, they are usually talking about the ethereal feelings of comfort and of being “loved” that they experience in their minds and bodies, that kind of parental nurturing and encouragement that they imagine they receive from a higher power. But consider, that some people use psychoactive compounds to experience identical feelings and to go on ‘spirit quests’, yet I doubt that even many interfaith people would believe these spiritualists are experiencing anything other than hallucinations within their brains, not messages from other spirits or beings, yet that is precisely what some practitioners like Terrence McKenna claim.
Still, at least their method is testable, which is more than can be said for more esoteric methods of attempting communication with a deity. If I want to know what they are feeling, I can attempt to trip on Peyote or LSD or Psilocybin, and each may produce similar emotions to the spiritualist, or a neurosurgeon might have more reliable results using advanced techniques to stimulate regions of my brain. Consider that you reject the psychonaut’s claims of communion with God through the use of drugs. On what grounds?
But when you make a statement pertaining to your experience of God, I don’t have any form of access to the information you claim to be getting. I cannot hear the music. I am left with no other recourse than to take you at your word, or not.
“But you can hear the music! You only have to listen!” Say you. “Through prayer, meditation or quiet retreat, you can ask these spirits for help and they will answer, but your heart must be open to it to receive the answer.”
I have no doubt that truly practicing meditation in the way one might practice a sport or music can lead one to experience interesting states of mind that reinforce a desire for peace and friendship, and reduce anxiety. However these feelings do next to nothing to reinforce the argument for the existence of a God, and do absolutely nothing to back up the historical or metaphysical claims of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any major practice.
Knowing the vast array of psychological failures that human beings are prone to, including the fallibility of memory and eyewitness testimony, our long history as a species with mental illness, the ability for our senses to be deceived, and an ever growing field of neuroscience which has an understanding of brain function, how can I take such an extraordinary claim, that you are silently communicating through ambiguous methods with a sentient force that created the entire universe, at face value? What’s more, the most important test for your claims should be reliability and repeatability. Do the same methods produce the same results, and do they lead us closer to a stable truth?
The Quakers, for example, believe in personal revelation, and it is central to their style of communion with God. I do feel obligated to say there is no doubt that Quakers have generally been a positive force in the world, and their actions have been central to many a progressive cultural reformation. Yet, at a Quaker meeting, members will often sit silently for long stretches, quietly probing their thoughts, waiting for what feels like a legitimate touch of divine inspiration before speaking. By what possible control do we evaluate their claims? What if what one Quaker hears is flatly contradicted by what another Quaker, or what someone of another faith claims to hear? What if they’re listening to different music? Who will be the adjudicator? There is simply nothing to appeal to but the secular values that society has adopted via a long, hard road of trial and error, experiment, enlightenment, education, and careful reasoning, in spite of the objections of every major religious institution throughout history.
Many atheists point out this fallacy in fundamentalist attitudes. If you believe that your view of God is the only legitimate one, you must recognize that there are billions who believe differently, but with equal conviction. You can’t all be right, therefore either one is right and the others are severely deluded, or all are wrong. People of irrationally strong faith will likely be unmoved by this argument, and they would be the kinds of people who would reject the treatise that began this piece, but it still should cause doubt in people who are open to reason. It is a question that you simply must reconcile.
I’ll admit this argument appears to lack teeth when pitted against progressive or interfaith believers, who would counter that it’s not that everyone who believes is wrong, but that everyone who believes is right, and that each religion has their own, often cultural, way of communicating with the same God.
So there isn’t either a Christian God or a Muslim God or Hindu Gods or what have you. There is still just one God, and all of these different religions are praying to the same one, they just may not realize it yet. Additionally, the interfaith community may see the various secondary spirits, prophets, demigods, or saints as one and the same, and these spiritual guides, the disembodied ‘helping hands’, work across faiths, and may present themselves differently based on a person’s cultural understanding.
The problem with this is that it is a complete fiction. There is no way around it, it is a construct born purely of human imagination, an attempt to plug gaping holes in faith based claims. It redefines God to such an extreme that the very notion a God has no power other than “a being who makes us feel good when we pray to him.” It does nothing to settle the longstanding contradictions in faith claims that all religions make, and more often than not leaves one clinging to the scattered debris of new-age metaphysics. Just try telling a Pentacostal that they are praying to the same God that Muslims are.
It seems to me the most that anyone can reasonably claim is a kind of abstract deism, where one chooses to believe that there might be a force at work in the universe that is difficult to understand – but that is where it stops. This does nothing to back up any claim about the truth or “specialness” of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any religion, by definition, at all. The past holds no exclusivity to revelation on matters of art or technique, ethics, science, or philosophy.
Since Christianity is the religion the West is most familiar with, let us examine it for a moment. Is it fair to say that if the bible had never been written, or if it had been scrubbed out by the Romans very early on, then Christianity wouldn’t exist either? I mean, how else would the stories have been passed down with integrity over such a long period? It would have been an enormous game of telephone (which one could argue is still the case today, even with the Bible), and we all know how well that game works. As it is, the Bible was compiled from writings over hundreds of years. I mean, the thing didn’t just magically pop into existence written in English, with gold lined pages and a leather binding with the words of Jesus printed in red. It was most definitely a human effort to make it what it is today, and you don’t know who those people were or what their motives were, do you? So in such a case, in a world with no Bible, what would become of the subsequent generations of human beings who would have no possible way to learn of Jesus and his supposed sacrifice?
Yet with this book, or the various collections of writings which make it and surround it, as the only sort of physical, historical evidence for Christ’s existence, a Christian follows it and believes as so.
And so along with a number of very odd and often violent tribal stories, including one where a prophet orders two she-bears to murder 42 youths for making fun of his baldness, the big central focus of it is this:
A God, a creator capable of dreaming up and manifesting an ordered universe of planets, vast stars and galaxies of almost unimaginable size, and the tremendous variety of creatures and order on this Earth, that God, roughly 2000 years ago, decided that for the creatures that he created to understand his mind, he needed to impregnate a virgin (and for some reason it’s terribly important that she is a virgin), then become born as human, grow up, gain a following, and then sacrifice himself, to himself, to save us all from…himself?
Even when I was very young I used to wonder what would have happened if a bold group of early Christians had stormed the crucifixion site and fought off the Romans to rescue Jesus, Robin Hood style. Would Jesus have said to his confused disciples: “Stop! Wait! This is supposed to happen! No don’t take me down, it’s all part of the plan! I’m supposed to die for your sins you silly idiots, oh you’ve ruined the whole thing…”
Additionally, there are so many traditions desperately clung to by the faithful that are hopelessly geocentric. Which direction does a Muslim face when praying to Mecca…from a colony on Mars? What possible influence could Bon mountain spirits have…when a colonial spaceship sets out beyond our solar system? When we finally gain the medical ability to re-grow a limb…what will become of faith healers and their circus tricks?
Now…
If one day, all of human knowledge was erased, perhaps through an astronomical collision or a catastrophic war – if we were reduced to mere cave-dwellers – all that we’ve learned would still be out there, waiting to be discovered again. It might not happen in the same way, but one day, calculus would be re-invented, but by someone other than Issac Newton. The atom would be split again, the computer re-invented, and we would learn to journey to the stars once more. Functional MRI imaging, lasers, photovoltaic panels, appendectomies and quadruple bypasses, democracies and codes of law, we’d dream it all up again by the careful, thoughtful, and slow exploration of our natural world.
For as long as humans have existed, we have sought answers. What is the earth and the sun, and what are the stars? Why do plants grow, and how can we use them? Why do we become ill, and how can we prevent it? How can our labors be made easier? In our earliest days we had no good answers, and made do the best we could. But we know better now, and it is time to put our trust in the only method which has time and time again pushed the human race forward.
If we abandon the pursuit of knowledge, there’s no telling how far backwards we might slip.
What sets us apart, what makes us most human, is our ability to reason. To experiment. To check things out for ourselves.
So don’t just take what life hands to you. Ask questions. Demand good answers, demand evidence, and stand on the side of progress.
