Category Archives: Religion

Cosmos and God

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It’s easy to understand why Creationists are not pleased with Cosmos: A Space Odyssey. After all, the show’s host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, emphatically and repeatedly states that the universe is billions of years old — in contradiction to the Creationist’s calculated age of less than 7,000 years. The show unequivocally supports a Darwinian view of evolution, another anathema to Creationists. To top it off, the show occasionally takes on religion more directly — noting the pagan origins of Christian holidays and the church’s historical persecution of heretics.

However, the primary challenge that Cosmos presents to religion is more far-reaching. It’s one that extends beyond a minority of people with extreme religious views. By explaining the physical and biological bases of our universe in terms of “natural laws,” it implies an absence of God’s role in their creation and maintenance. Most particularly, the evidence presented on Cosmos represents a challenge to a commonly accepted core religious tenet — the one that states God takes an active interest in and intervenes in our lives, that humans are a central focus of God’s attention, that we should “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth,” and ultimately that we are in some sense “special” and are the reason behind the very existence of the universe.

How exactly does Cosmos challenge all this? Here’s how…

The science

From the viewpoint of science, humans “arrival” in the universe is hardly special. While the universe is almost 14 billion years old, humans did not appear on earth until the very very end of this enormous stretch of time. As an analogy, if you compressed all of time into a “cosmic year,” humans would not appear until about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. Christ was  born only 5 seconds(!) before midnight. The American Revolution happened during the final second (the clock tick we are currently living in).

Further, although we are now here, our continued existence is far from guaranteed. For one thing, changes in the size and temperature of our sun will almost certainly destroy the earth within several billion years. Unless we have found a way to colonize other planets by then, humans will disappear. But we needn’t wait that long. Due to both natural and human-caused changes in our environment (such as global-warming), our species is likely to go extinct well before that far-off catastrophe. This should not be a surprise. Extinction is a natural part of life on earth: it’s estimated that “99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.”

For those who want to cling to the notion that humans represent some sort of pinnacle of creation, the news gets even worse. Most views of the evolution suggest that the very existence of humans is an unlikely occurrence that might well have never happened. By this I mean, if we could rewind the tape of evolution, and allow for different random events to occur as the tape replays, it is quite likely that humans would never appear.

One episode of Cosmos beautifully demonstrated this point. It showed how the earth is not at all the static object that it appears to us to be. It only seems static because the time scale of  change far exceeds our life spans. At the appropriate larger time scale, we would see how the movement of tectonic plates separated the continents and created oceans. These movements continue today and may yet reverse, eventually bringing the land masses back together.

In another example of cycling, repeated minor wobblings of the earth’s orbit over thousands of years result in ice ages. The polar icecaps grow, extending much closer to the equator than they are now, only to recede again as the ice age retreats.

In other words, the human-friendly earth that now exists may not remain in the future.

Not every big change occurs in cycles that take thousands of years to transpire. Our planet’s evolution is occasionally altered by dramatic one-time random events — such as the giant meteor that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. If that meteor had not landed, it’s quite plausible that dinosaurs would still roam the earth and humans would have never evolved.

Finally, there’s the matter of the earth’s place within the vast scope of the universe. The earth is one of several planets orbiting the sun, the collection of objects that make up our solar system. The size of our solar system is immense. In fact, it has only been in the last year or so that Voyager 1 managed to become the first human-made object to exit our solar system. It took years of travel to do so. Members of our species may never travel much beyond the borders of our solar system. It would take 4 light-years, for example, just to get to our nearest star.

And yet, the size of our solar system is dwarfed by the rest of the universe. Our solar system is just one of billions of such systems in our galaxy. In fact, if you were to look at an 8×10 photo of the Milky Way galaxy, our sun would be too small to distinguish, buried in a tiny unremarkable corner. And our galaxy is just one of about “100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.” Put another way, if you held up a grain of sand to the night sky, the patch that it covers would contain about 10,000 galaxies. The universe is so large that, even if we could travel at the speed of light, it would take about 93 billion years to travel from one end to the other.

The story may not end with our universe. Most recently, astrophysicists are coming to the conclusion that there are multiple universes. Ours is merely one of many.

Viewed from this pan-universe perspective, the “pale blue dot” of earth is infinitesimally small. It is of no consequence to our universe, certainly not to a multi-verse. If the universe can survive supernovas that destroy entire star systems, it can certainly survive without earth. If you metaphorically thought of just our universe as equivalent to a human body, the earth’s destruction would be about like the death of one sub-cellular structure in one random unimportant cell.

The questions

Returning to the matter of religion, the immense size and time scale of our universe would appear to pose some problems:

If we egocentrically maintain that humans are the crowning achievement of God’s creation, a primary reason for the very existence of the universe, how does it make sense for the universe to be so large that most of it has no direct bearing on our existence? And, conversely, that we have almost no influence beyond our planet? What’s the point of having solar systems so far away that we can never even know of their existence? Why wouldn’t an omnipotent God create something on a more human-like scale?

Similarly, why create a universe in which humans did not even arrive until billions of years after the birth of the universe, at the last few “minutes”? Wouldn’t it make more sense for an omnipotent God to bring humans on the scene much sooner?

Given that we are likely to go extinct as a species, how can we be central to “God’s plan”? From a religious perspective, what is the “purpose” of a universe existing after we are gone? And what would have been the purpose of a universe where we, as a species, never even appeared?

Finally, given the immense size of the universe, it’s likely that there is life, perhaps life similar to ours, on at least a few other planets out there. If this is so, what are the implications for a “special creation” of humans on earth? Are these other life forms on other planets just as important to God? If not, why not?

Taken together, it’s hard to comprehend how all of this can fit within a view that places humans at the center of God-directed existence. Not impossible, granted. But very hard. Cosmos’ creators may or may not have intended to raise these challenges. But that is the effect the show has had on me, and I presume many others.

The answers

One response to these challenges is to assert that science is simply wrong. Despite all the contrary evidence, for example, one might still contend that the earth is less than 7,000 years old. Why? Because the Bible says so. This is the Creationist view.

Nothing I or anyone could say will affect people who hold such a view. At the same time, it’s relatively easy for the rest of us to dismiss these extreme views. The contrary evidence, from geology to evolution to astrophysics, is too overwhelming. That’s why I am instead appealing here to people who are at least willing to consider alternatives.

So what about a less extreme view, one that is more consonant with science but still maintains humanity’s central position? One could accept certain facts, such as the billion years age of the universe, and yet largely ignore their implications. If evidence or logic makes a religious view seem implausible, the explanation is that God’s reasons are unknowable to us. In other words, one resorts to the familiar adage: “God works in mysterious ways.” Perhaps the answers will become clear years from now. Perhaps they never will.

By this view, we needn’t explain why a human-focused God created such an immense universe that existed for such an immense stretch of time before humans arrived. We simply accept it as true and assume we are too ignorant to ever know God’s rationales. Similarly, God may yet intervene with a miracle and prevent the events that would otherwise lead to our species’ extinction. We can’t know.

Unfortunately, “mysterious ways,” “unknowable futures” and miracles are the weakest cop-outs of arguments. They are non-explanations which can never be proven or disproven. No amount of scientific knowledge can ever call such “explanations” into question. As such, they are useless.

This doesn’t deny the possible existence of some “higher power.” After all, the creation and scope of the universe are indeed hard to fathom. “Why is there anything?” remains an almost impossible to answer question.

That’s why I’m not trying to mount a philosophical argument to prove or disprove the existence of God here. If that’s what you want, there’s plenty of material out there for you to digest, written by experts with much more knowledge than I have (although I did take a brief amateur’s stab at the topic several years back).

Rather, I am suggesting skepticism at the idea of an interventionist God, one that answers prayers and metes out punishments, one that performs miracles, and especially one that places earth and humans at the central core of existence. If you can temporarily suspend any a priori belief in such notions, I believe an Occam’s Razor test would lead to the conclusion that such a view of God doesn’t fit with our scientific understanding of the universe.

The universe, as viewed through the lens of modern science, is no less amazing and awe-inspiring than a Biblical universe. It is simply one that does not place humans at its center. It forces us to accept that we are not anything close to as “special” as most religions would have us believe.

While some religious groups may thus view science as a threat, I prefer to view science more optimistically — as a light that illuminates the darkness that would otherwise surround us, a light that provides the means to understand the wonders of our world and offers our best chance for continuing to survive on this earth and within this universe we call home.

Noah? No

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Here’s a footnote to my prior article on Cosmos and God:

If ever there was a Bible story that makes absolutely no sense, it is the story of Noah. It’s so easy to find logical fallacies in the telling that it hardly seems worth the trouble to do so. However, Noah has recently received more than his usual amount of attention, thanks to the Darren Aronofsky movie starring Russell Crowe. An assortment of articles (such as this one) debate the story’s “accuracy.” Several Christian groups are alarmed at the movie’s supposed misrepresentations.

Although there’s not much I can add that has not already been said, I’ll offer a few personal thoughts anyway:

• In Genesis 6-9, God expresses his regret at creating “man” because all men have become evil and wicked. Really? Isn’t God perfect? If so, how could he create something he later regrets?

As an aside: Can you imagine what would happen if someone alive today claimed to be having conversations with God similar to what Noah had? They would almost certainly be declared insane.

• Can it really be true that everyone on earth was evil at the time of Noah, as God asserts in Genesis? What about newborn children? What about most children really? What about the people in distant parts of the world that were unaware of what was going on in the Middle East?

Did everyone really have to die to appease God here? Why couldn’t God have selectively destroyed just the truly evil people, similar to what he did when the Egyptian first-born were slain — as told in Exodus and recalled by Jews every Passover? For some reason, this was apparently not a possibility.

Instead, if the story is true, God executed the biggest act of genocide in history (as others have pointed out).

• Moving on to the specifics of the flood (and again as has been pointed out by others), it would be impossible for the ark to contain a pair of every living creature. There were just too many. It would certainly be impossible for them all to survive for the duration that the ark was afloat. For starters, the varying ecological requirements for each species would prevent this.

Digging a bit deeper, what about the polar bears in the Arctic, the penguins in Antarctica, or all the animals unique to Australia? What about species that live exclusively in caves? Or in the jungles of South America? Did they somehow make it to the ark? If so, how? And if not, how do we explain their existence today?

On a smaller scale, consider insects. There are “more than 925,000 species of insects that scientists have identified. Still, this represents only 20 percent of all species believed to exist” today. Were all of these species on the ark? What about all the microscopic organisms that existed at the time? Were these “paired up” and put on the ark? Not likely.

Yes, one could argue that God intervened, in some miraculous way, to allow all these animals to board the ark, co-exist and survive until the flood waters receded. But resorting to miracles is a slippery slope. If God could use a miracle to accomplish something like this, why require an ark at all? Why couldn’t God have instead used his miraculous powers to keep the necessary animals alive without an ark? Wouldn’t that have been much simpler?

I am sure that the people who take the Noah story literally have invented answers to respond to all of these questions. But that’s the point. They are “invented” answers. They are suppositions. They have no basis in fact.

My view here extends beyond the story of Noah to the Bible as a whole. Rather than viewing the Bible as literal historical truth, it makes more sense to view it as a collection of stories created by humans in an attempt to comprehend the world back when humans had very little knowledge about how the world really worked.

Consider this: From the time the New Testament Bible was written, it would take about 1,500 more years before we came to accept that the earth revolved around the sun and not the reverse. It is only in the last two centuries that we’ve come to understand that stars are actually distant suns light-years away from earth. At the other end of the spectrum, it took us the same 1,500 years to discover that microscopic organisms exist and the critical role they play in our lives. It’s been less than 100 years since we broke the genetic code and began to truly comprehend how reproduction and inheritance work. In that context, it’s not surprising that people might take the story of Noah seriously thousands of years ago. But not anymore.

Presumably, an omniscient God, present at the time of Christ, knew that someday we would “discover” bacteria, DNA, computers, space travel, black holes and all the rest that makes up modern science — including many things we have yet to discover. And yet the Bible makes no mention of any of this. Rather, as you would expect from a document written by humans, it is restricted to the (very limited and often incorrect) knowledge humans had at the time.

That’s why for me, rather than come up with torturous explanations for the contradictions and impossibilities contained in the Noah story, it makes far more sense to accept the obvious: The story amounts to a folk tale, a fable, a legend, a morality lesson. Call it whatever you want. Just don’t call it true.

Intelligence, Evolution and Politics

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In the most recent Sunday New York Times, Frank Bruni argues that being “smart”, at least in the scholarly academic intellectual sense that President Obama is generally considered to be smart, is not a guarantee that a President will be a strong leader, or always make wise policy decisions, or have the ability to effectively carry out their decisions.

I agree with the basic assertion. There are multiple components to intelligence. Being good at one aspect does not automatically make you superior in all aspects. If it were otherwise, it would mean that nearly everyone on the faculty at Harvard would necessarily make a great president. I don’t think anyone believes that. It’s no different than athletic prowess. Being a good sprinter does not mean you are also a good long distance runner.

However, it does not follow that “intellectual” intelligence is irrelevant to being a good President. I believe a substantially above average intellectual intelligence should be a bar which all viable presidential candidates should be expected to surmount. In the extremes, there is no argument here. That is, while I doubt anyone would contend that being able to read guarantees that a person will be a great President, we all expect our President to be able to read.

So where do we set the bar? How much intellectual skill should be required for a Presidential candidate?

Here is where we can get into legitimate debate. If we can all agree that being “smart” is a desirable attribute, I hope we can similarly agree that being “dumb” should be case for elimination from consideration. [“Dumb” is a hard word to define here (and has an insulting context). But I’m not sure what other word better fits here as the opposite of “smart.”]

One way to demonstrate that you are not “dumb” is to show you are not ignorant of and do not reject basic tenets of science. We wouldn’t want a president making decisions about global policy if he thought the world was flat. We wouldn’t want a president in charge of the space program who though the sun revolved around the earth. We wouldn’t want a president in charge of the economy who planned to spend huge sums of money on finding a way to turn lead into gold. We wouldn’t want a president overseeing our national health care policy who rejected the idea that bacteria is a major cause of disease.

In this same list of basic tenets is evolution. As Dobzhansky famously stated: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” To biologists (and virtually all other reputable scientists), support for “creationism” or “intelligent design” has no valid basis. It makes no more sense than supporting the notion that the earth is flat or asserting that gravity is a questionable concept. We should certainly not be teaching it in science classes in schools. Just because an idea exists, and some people believe it, is not a sufficient reason to include the idea in a science curriculum.

[Note: I’ve written several prior columns here on the evolution “controversy.” This is not the place for me to do another. If you’re interested in this matter, I would recommend Jerry A. Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. I would also direct you to the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District decision, in which a Republican-appointed judge gave a definitive ruling rejecting intelligent design as a thinly veiled attempt to get creationism back in schools, that creationism was religion and not science, and that as such creationism in schools should be rejected. Finally, I strongly recommend you check out “Understanding Evolution: 17 Misconceptions and Their Responses.”]

This gets me, finally, to the subject of politics — and especially to the current crop of Republicans seeking their party’s nomination for President. As covered in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the candidates’ positions on this issue, while not exactly surprising, are appalling.
Every one of them, except for John Huntsman, gave at least minimal support to a belief in creationism and in teaching “intelligent design” in schools. Here are three examples:

• Rick Perry has described himself as “a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect.”

• Ron Paul said he does not accept the theory of evolution.

• Rick Santorum calls himself a “fierce believer” in creationism.

There are only two explanations for such “dumb” statements. The first is that the candidates are being hypocritical, that they don’t really believe what they are saying. Rather, they are saying it only because they fear that saying anything else will so antagonize the conservative base of their party (most of whom cling to the “creationism” fantasy) that they lose any chance to get the nomination.

The second is that they truly believe what they are saying.

In either case, it should be sufficient to eliminate such candidates from consideration. In the first case, not only are they liars, but they are deliberately misleading to their own supporters. In the second case, they have shown they are unable to surmount the intelligence bar that I argued should be a minimum requirement for the job.

I don’t expect the candidates or the Republican party in general, to follow my recommendations. I just ask that you keep all this in mind when you go to the polls.

(Atheist) Signs for Our Times

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In a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof expresses hope that a new crop of books, with titles like “The Case for God,” will lead to a truce in the “religious wars.” This is just one of several articles I have read recently — that all seem to suggest that prominent atheists (such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris) represent a form of intolerance that is equal to those of religious fundamentalists at the opposite extreme. What we need to find, so the argument goes, is some middle compromise.

I have already stated my general opposition to this viewpoint. I won’t repeat all of those arguments here. I will, however, point out one particular dismay: Although the “truce” articles pay lip service to the need for accommodations by “both sides,” the onus of responsibility always seems to fall on the atheists. It’s as if they are saying: “Things were going so well before people like Dawkins came along to upset the apple cart. Can’t we just return to the civility we used to have?”

First off, unless you ignore the inflammatory statements made over the years by religious extremists, it can hardly be said that things were civil before Richard Dawkins arrived on the scene. To the contrary, any superficial appearance of civility was only because religion has had the playing field to itself, fending off criticism by claiming that it should be immune to critique. The “new atheists” did not create the current controversy. Rather, they are simply the ones to be outspoken in pointing out that there is another possibility to consider (a bit like the child who shouts “the emperor has no clothes”). If one believes that God does not exist, then it follows that all religions are wrong and are based on a myth. It is not intolerant to point out this implication, any more than it is intolerant to point out that humans are the product of evolution.

All of this, however, is not the primary reason for my blog entry today. Rather, it is something more specific. On December 2, a New York Times article described a new advertising campaign for atheism. It features signs on buses and trains with statements such as “No god? … No problem!” and “Be good for goodness’ sake.” A major sponsor of the campaign is the American Humanist Association.

In a letter to the editor, Edd Doerr (a former head of the American Humanist Association) wrote that he was “embarrassed” by the campaign. He argued that we should avoid the divisiveness resulting from these ads and instead focus on those things we (atheists and religious believers) hold in common, such as “peace, civil liberties, religious freedom, the environment, social justice…” He described the signs as “name-calling and invective.”

Whew! I was both saddened and angry to see this letter. To me, it captures almost everything that is wrong with the current criticism. To have it written by someone within the humanist movement was especially disheartening.

First of all, to suggest that these signs represent “name-calling and invective” is almost libelous. They are incredibly tame, especially compared to the true invective that is often directed toward atheists. “Be good for goodness’ sake”? Where is the invective in this? If atheists are not to be “allowed” to express their views even in these mild terms, in what form can we express our views? Or, to turn it around, should any signs promoting a religious belief, no matter how mild, be banned as well?

But let’s put all that aside. Suppose we accept the idea, however wrong, that these signs are provocative and hostile in some way. Does this mean that these signs are necessarily a bad thing? Hardly. When it comes to making progress against discrimination, being provocative has often been a requirement.

Where would African Americans be today if Rosa Parks had quietly sat in the back of the bus? Or if Martin Luther King had never staged a sit-in? Where would women’s rights be today if not for the provocations of people such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinham — women who were criticized as “strident” in expressing their beliefs?

The actions of such people may not be the only ingredients necessary to move the country forward. Conciliation will also be needed. But without these actions to lead the way, there will be no movement at all.

As such, these signs represent a mild and relatively polite form of political activism. If nothing else, they help make it more acceptable for atheists to be open about their beliefs and will ultimately lead to greater tolerance of such beliefs (see this Wikipedia page for a discussion of discrimination against atheists). We may actually already be seeing the beginnings of this shift. As pointed out in the above-cited NYT article, there is a “growing number of nonbelievers. Fifteen percent of Americans identified themselves as having ‘no religion’ in a 2008, up from 8 percent in 1990…”

Sorry Edd, but it is the rest of us who should be embarrassed by you. Your letter represents the sort of frightened head-in-the-sand attitude that, if followed a half-century ago, would have resulted in blacks still drinking from separate water fountains today. As an atheist, I am proud of these signs. I also look forward to the day when they are no longer needed.