Science-based Religion Blog

God is not a terrorist!

2011-03-16T16:25:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post to condemn the many (ir)religious among us blaming the devastation in Japan on God or Karma or anything else other than plate tectonics. If we are to believe many pious commentators, the thousands who died a horrifying death--including many children, unborn infants, and people who have lived lives of love and compassion--are being punished for atheism or some other heresy.

When someone says something to this effect, ask them, "So you're saying God is a terrorist!" If they object, point out that terrorists, such as the ones against whome we are fighting a war, routinely kill people without regard to the innocents who perish in an attempt to so terrorize a population that they capitulate to whatever the terrorists want to replace the current regime.

How is it any different if God were to destroy human life in an effort to get people to love and obey Him? It is like a parent beating a child because the child does not love the parent because the child is beaten by the parent. If we are to believe the Bible, God has been a terrorist from the beginning, starting with the flood, and following up with destruction of cities like Sodom and Gommorrah, and even killing nothing but children in the Passover event that successfully terrorized the Egyptians so much they caved to the demands of their captives.

While the ancients clearly found such a God a plausible being and one who must be worshipped for fear of being punished, we do not need to share their fear. We are part of a world which has many things that cause pain and suffering, which befall all creatures, not just humans. Many of these things have long term benefits and have shaped us into the beings we are. Earthquakes such as the one in Japan have happened very regularly since the beginning of the earth and may be responsible for the planet supporting life. The fact that we are now suffering from time to time because of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, and such is just an unavoidable accident of our evolution. That which makes these events also makes all the things we love so much about this world, its beauty, its tender expressions of cooperation and love, and so much more.

I recommend the writings of Michael Dowd for speaking out on this issue with compassion and reason. Here is a link to something he wrote in response to those who are blaming God and in some cases praising God for the deaths in Japan. http://evolutionarychristianity.com/blog/general/why-christianity-simply-must-evolve/

The Need for Moderation

2009-08-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

My main reason for this post is to commend the L. A. Times for an opinion by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum regarding the anti-religious confrontationalism of Richard Dawkins, P. Z. Myers, and Jerry Coyne, Must science declare a holy war on religion? I applaud this voice of reason on this very important issue of the compatibility of science and religion. The authors argue that in America, where scientific illiteracy is a major problem because many religious people fear belief in evolution is rejection of God, those who equate belief in evolution with rejection of religion are doing more harm than good.

I think the issue goes beyond the practical effect of attacks on religion on the successful teaching of evolution as a scientific theory (which, it should not need to be said, means it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt). Religion at large is being smeared because scientists, of all people, are allowing themselves to make a generalization the basis of a very limited sample of information.

This is religious bigotry in a weird kind of inverted form. Scientists are turning their hatred for the religion of some into rejection of all religion, even ones they know nothing about. It is furthermore the height of irrationality to reject religion for not perfectly mirroring the findings of science. Religious myth does not attempt to explain the world as science does. It is attempting to express various understandings about our place in the cosmos. These expressions are epistemologically the same as literature. Literature is made up of works of fiction and poetry. Neither conveys truth as science does, in propositions that can be tested with direct observation and experimentation. A book does not have to be literally true for it to convey truth to the reader. The same is true of poetry. Religious ritual has more in common with theater and dance than science. A religious ritual is not trying to express some proposition that must be tested with logic and observation. It is creating an experience for the person or people taking part in it.

If science invalidates religion, it must also invalidate all fiction, poetry, music, dance, and art. Please speak out about this whenever you hear someone argue that science has replaced or ought to replace religion.

Evolution and Non-Evolution of God

2009-07-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

A new book by Robert Wright has been stirring a lot of good discussion on web sites regarding the idea that we can understand religions at least in part by considering them to be part of our human evolution. The book is called The Evolution of God. I have yet to read it, but based on reviews, I think it is something I would agree with in general, if not in detail. I've shared my ideas of how evolution can help us understand how religion has been part of most human cultures. I shared a thumbnail view in a comment to a N.Y. Times blog article titled, The Non-Evolution of God.

One of my comments was referenced in a subsequent article in the same blog. Here is that comment. I have corrected a few typos and added a few links.

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I strongly recommend anyone interested in the idea of evolution of religion and ethics read Frans de Waal (mentioned in the article) on the behavior of primate groups (the science of ethology or animal behavior); also read Robert Axelrod on the evolution of cooperation.

De Waal shows that primate colonies demonstrate moral awareness which is in part taught to each new member. Axelrod shows that there is a survival advantage to cooperation. The evolution of animals that form societies demonstrates the value of cooperation, from ant colonies to primates.

But evolution must work with what came before and in the case of the human brain, we’ve retained elements from early reptiles (mainly promoting sex, obtaining food, and not being killed by predators) to early mammals, with sensitivity to welfare of others evolving a sometimes different set of priorities, as when a mother fights to defend her offspring. We have further built on that developing more sophisticated abilities, such as abstract thought and language. Humans have to learn most of what we use to survive, so that we can adapt to different environments. So we must learn to cooperate. But our different parts of our brains push us in different directions, leading to conflicting urges. The reptile part of our brains says look out for number one, while a different part says protect your family, while our leaders say fight for the fatherland.

I believe that if you put all this together, you get the evolution of religion along with abstract thinking and especially language. Religions promote ethical behavior (cooperation) by linking it to aspects of our experience by which we are most awestruck, both positive and negative, sometimes referred to as the holy or the sacred. For this to work, the linkage from sacred to ethical cooperation does not have to true in an absolute sense, so long as people believe it is true and pass it on to their offspring. This is why, IMHO, religions are so different in their ideas about the afterlife (heaven, hell, reincarnation), the Absolute (God, Tao, Buddha, to name a few), and so on and yet are so similar in the ethics they promote (be nice to people and share and protect your fellows, especially those part of your local group).

Humans no longer need to evolve biologically, since it is easier to adjust the environment and our behavior. But this does not mean evolution has stopped. Hoffstadter, Dennett, and others have pointed out that cultural concepts propagate and evolve using similar mechanisms to biological evolution. If an idea (sometimes called a meme to draw attention to the similarity to a gene) promotes survival, it will be more likely to be passed on. So religion could evolve to allow us to manage our conflicting behavioral urges in order to take full advantage of the benefits offered by cooperation.

Does this mean all religions are just fluffy products of our imaginations? Maybe, but not necessarily. In science we often find that ideas expressed by mathematicians with no intention of modeling real world phenomena usually turn out to actually correspond to what we observe in the physical world. Religion (some at least) might actually be on to important realities of the universe. Most cultures believe in spirits and a spirit reality. Is this just wishful thinking? I think we can see a wide range of experiences people have across cultures and times, that convince them of spiritual reality. I personally think the evidence, taken as a whole is best explained with the reality of a spirit dimension that transcends the physical and hence is not easy to observe with our scientific instruments.

If this is true, then some notion of the Absolute is also in order, even if we can only apprehend it experientially or speak of it with analogies and poetry. Call me mistaken, but don’t call me irrational or superstitious. Same goes for people’s religious beliefs. Respect them with the same open-mindedness a scientist should have for anything he/she does not completely understand.

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The idea of different parts of our brains from different stages in our evolution producing ethical dilemmas was introduced to me by Michael Dowd, in Thank God for Evolution. If more proof is needed, he shows that it need not be the case that religion and science must be at odds. His arguments are well thought out and backed up with accurate understanding of human neurology and history. I recommend you read his book. Better yet, listen to him in person the next time he is in your area. He and his wife travel constantly delivering their ideas to open-minded audiences all over the place.

I'm Back

2009-01-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

I have not posted at this blog for a while because I've been focused on building a business and working several part-time jobs. One of those was teaching a world religion class at a nearby university. It was very interesting to see how college students today are thinking about religion, what they know and don't know about other religions, and how they are affected by this knowledge.

I did not get to spend time spinning out my thoughts on science and religion with the classes, but I did stress that the approach to learning about religions was essentially scientific; that is, we would focus on things that we could objectively identify about other religions without passing judgment about the truths any religion professes. This avoided confrontations but it also taught important truths about religion as a human phenomenon. The world religions are impressive for their depth of history, complexity, and sophistication.

Science has not been around so long (at least the modern incarnation of it). But science has provided humankind more reliable information about the nature of the universe than all religions put together. This does not mean religions are wrong-headed, only that they are not designed to investigation the way the universe is. Religions are designed (I would argue by evolution) to interpret the significance of what is known (or believed) about our place in the cosmos.

Teaching these religions has underlined for me the importance of each religion entering into a dialogue with science to bring the interpretations of the universe up to date, to illumine or place not in the universe people thought we lived in two thousand years ago, but the universe we know we inhabit today.

Now that I’m done teaching for a while, things are slowing down a bit, so I want to get back to posting at this blog. Please leave comments and let me know what you think about these ideas. Thanks.

Long Time No Blogging

2008-09-23T03:42:00.001-07:00

I started this blog when I was in a stable work situation that gave me some regular time for blogging, but then that changed. Since then, I've been adjusting to working several part-time jobs and finding it easier to leave this blog sit for a while.

One of my current jobs, however, is teaching a course in World Religions at a local University. It has me thinking more about religion. I recently posted a comment on a blog by Jason Rosenhouse, Evolution Blog, a fine blog that I recommend. The content of his blog on 9/22/08 was, if I may so summarize it, whether it was possible for religion to exist in today's world given what science has shown us about our place in the cosmos. My comment was to the effect that, as I've argued elsewhere in my blog and elsewhere, it is quite possible for religion to share mental space with religion, provided one chooses the right religion.

I hope I'll get back to blogging here and in my other blog on Evidence for Evolution. There are many challenging aspects to this important topic to be considered.

The Science of Understanding Ourselves

2006-11-20T20:02:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Karen Armstrong's new book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions. It is an intriguing look at four cultures and their religions during the Axial Age, the time roughly from 700 BCE to 400 BCE. During this time, Greek science and philosophy produced many remarkable ideas; the Jewish religion was transformed, in part, by prophets who asserted that God cared more about compassion than ritual sacrifices; India produced sages who sought to uncover enlightenment through examination of consciousness, including the Buddha; and China produced the great sages of Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, and Chuang Tsu.

Although I've read less than half the book so far, it is clear that during these few hundred years, all these cultures thrived in part because there were people willing to depart from the traditions handed down from generations past and explore new ideas and new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. The people responsible for these changes would be what we today would call "Religious Liberals."

While liberal is a distasteful word to many in our society, without liberals, no culture could endure. Liberals are intellectual adventurers, willing to leave behind the comfortable, well-worn ideas of the past and explore other possibilities. Liberals are not interested in change for the sake of change, but change that enhances our world. Without liberals, slavery would never have been abolished, women would not have the right to vote or own property, indeed, our country would not have its constitution. Science would be impossible without liberals, because science must be willing to accept change, is actually happy for change when it is supported by evidence that the new will be better than the old. Without science there would be no high technology, no medical miracles. We would still be afraid of our shadows, burning witches and books in an effort to preserve what exists unchanged.

Science has helped us understand this by giving us the ability to see into the past, to understand what life was like for people in many different places and times. It is remarkable that I can sit in my living room and learn what it was like to live in Israel, Greece, India, or China twenty-five hundred years ago. Science has made this possible. History is a science. It advances our understanding by applying reasoning to the evidence left by events of the past. A scientific history would never believe something is true just because it is written in a well-respected or allegedly sacred text.

Most all the people in the three major Western religions are guilty of tunnel vision, of ignoring this wealth of information about other people's lives, peoples whose lives were informed and shaped by ideas other than those that shaped our own ideas. These people mean well and are honestly trying to do the responsible thing, but they fail to appreciate how different the world is from what they understand of it.

Consider the fundamentalist Christian who insists that all the books of the Christian Bible are divinely inspired. They say that without this book, we would know nothing about God and our place in the world. But if that were true, what does it say about all the people who have strived for religious truth in all the other places and times of the world? Are their blood, sweat, and tears worth nothing? Did they live and die in vain, forever cut off from the divine revelation without which they cannot hope to understand God?

Each religious person should be required to explain whether or not the truths of her religion can be determined independently from that religion's traditions and texts. Most members of Western religions would have to say no, without their tradition, one cannot know the truth. But in saying this, each of these traditions is contradicting the idea that God is a universal God, the same for all people, valuing all people equally. For how could God favor the Jews but not the Chinese, the Moslems but not the native Americans?

Or are religions more like scientific ideas? Are they theories that need to be explored, tested, enhanced, changed? Can they be right about some things and wrong about others? If so, we have something to learn from all traditions. Christians should be happy to have Buddhist or Hindu missionaries come live in their communities to enlighten them about the religious tradition of their lands.

Instead, we have fundamentalists in all three major Western religions who would gladly incinerate the infidels and pagans to make the world safe for their own religious ideas. If you are interested in more information about the roots of fundamentalism, read Karen Armstrong's book, The Battle for God. Fundamentalists have been made to feel alienated or injured by the advances of modern science and technology and have retreated into the presumed security of a religious text. In so doing, they cut themselves off from the bounty of God's wisdom as revealed to people in all places and times. This, to me is blasphemy and an insult to God.

Atheist Oversimplification of Religion

2006-10-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

After doing a search on the quote "conflict between science and religion", I came across the following website: http://mwillett.org/atheism/relsci.htm. In this article discussing how science and religion are different, the author says, "Religion relies on authority — from a person, book, or tradition — and its Truth is supposed to be universal and eternal." This is false, taken literally. True, some religions take such a stance toward authority and truth, but not all. Some take an opposite view. For example, Buddha warned his disciples not to make his own words into sacred truth nor to think that those who know his words will be enlightened. The only true authority in Buddhism (or at least some important strands of Buddhism) is experience. That is why they insist on meditation. That is why the Zen Buddhists preserve and teach the paradoxical assertions of the Zen masters in response to questions posed by unenlightened monks.

New Age religions are diverse, but many, if not most, stress the importance of individuals coming to their own confirmation of the ideas presented. I have witnessed many sessions in which a channel medium (one who presumes to allow a more advanced spiritual entity to speak through his/her body) answers questions from the listeners. Many of these listeners come to channel mediums expecting that the medium's special spiritual source can tell them what to do and what to believe. Over and over, these mediums have asserted (or the spirits they are channeling have asserted) that the person should not take their word for it but must verify the ideas in their own experience.

Unitarian Universalism is another religion that takes the authority of science seriously and is skeptical of ancient scriptures or religious traditions as being acceptable without question.

The author of the article makes the following statement:

"A scientific investigation starts with a question, and tries to reach a conclusion by finding evidence and applying reason. A theological investigation, though, starts with a conclusion, and tries to wiggle around any impediments of evidence and logic in order to justify that conclusion."

I have already described two religious traditions that operate like the scientist and not the theologian described above. This is an example of stereotyping and is evidence of ignorance and prejudice. Anyone who values science as much as this author does should take the same thorough approach to understanding religion as to understanding evolution or physics. Don't make sweeping generalizations based on a limited population of evidence.

The author concludes with the following paragraph:

It's true that many intelligent people embrace both science and religion. They seem to compartmentalize their thinking; it's as if they use different parts of the mind for science and religion, with hardly any interconnection between those parts. They adopt the comfortable myth that there isn't, or shouldn't be, a conflict between science and religion.

The author needs to expand his horizon and stop simplifying such a vast field of human experience as religion down to one small portion of the field. It is much the same fallacy as those who try to discredit the truth of biological evolution by plucking out a few factoids to illustrate their case and ignore the rest of the evidence because it contradicts their pet idea. I hope people don't take a similarly prejudiced view of those who embrace science as closed-minded atheists.

This I Believe

2006-07-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

I was reading some of the series of short essays that NPR elicits from various significant members of society continuing the idea of "This I believe, ..." In his essay, titled Science Nourishes the Mind and the Soul, Brian Greene, a physicist and author, explains how when he was a child and had just been to a planetarium, he was uneasy about what he had just learned. He was told that Earth is not the center of the universe, of everything, but rather a small bit of a very large collection of similar bits.

In this, he echoes the sentiments of adults over the past four hundred years as various facts about our place in the cosmos relentlessly chipped away at the religiously based myth that the earth is the God's only creation of a world, and we (humans) are the most important of the creatures upon the earth. Further, these religious myths imply that God only really cares about a small segment of the humans, those He took the trouble to inform about Himself and His will.

While science has displaced us from that lofty perch, we need not wallow in a miasma of insignificance. As Green puts it, he later came to change his mind about the results of science.

While we are small, my decades of immersion in science convince me this is cause for celebration. From our lonely corner of the cosmos we have used ingenuity and determination to touch the very limits of outer and inner space. We have figured out fundamental laws of physics -- laws that govern how stars shine and light travels, laws that dictate how time elapses and space expands, laws that allow us to peer back to the briefest moment after the universe began.

My study of physics has resulted in similar revelations. People who have not studied science beyond the required classes of high school biology cannot understand the perspective of the scientist, any more than I can understand the perspective of one who has been on the moon or someone who has meditated six hours a day for twenty years or survived the Nazi Holocaust. But I can assure you that spending thousands of hours focused on the equations and experiments of science does change your perspective. It becomes impossible to look at things the same as before one learned all this.

As an example, I can vividly recall a class I took during my undergraduate study of physics, a course in mechanics, the physics of bodies in motion. As this was an honors physics class, we did more than solve simple equations such as F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration, one of Newton's laws). On this day, we set out to understand the Coriolis Force. This "force" is like the so-called "centrifugal force," which we think of as a force that pushes one right when one turns left in a car, for example. What we are really feeling is our body trying to continue to move in the direction it was traveling in before the turn began. The real force is the force pushing the car (and its occupants) off the straight path.

The Coriolis Force is like this, but it is the result of moving parallel to the surface of a rotating sphere. Imagine trying to fly south while the earth rotates beneath the plane. From the perspective of the plane, the surface below is shifting from right to left, from west to east. But we tend to take the perspective that the earth is not moving and so the plane seems to be pushed sideways.

Describing it this way is good for a start, but this class started with a more formal mathematical description of the situation. Motion in an equation is represented as a change in position divided by a change in time. Over a non-moving surface, this is simple. But then the equation is transformed so that it is operating in a frame of reference of a rotating sphere. One gets a rather complex and daunting differential equation which must be solved using various techniques of calculus. The professor began to transform the equation using the rules of calculus and so line by line the equation became longer and longer, but each equation still representing the idea of motion near the surface of a rotating sphere.

At one point, I looked at these long strings of letters, many of them from the Greek alphabet, with another collection of symbols used in calculus.

See this link for some examples. For a moment, I took myself out of my state of mind of following the logic of the derivation. I realized that at one time, years before, I would have looked at this as so much nonsense. But because I had spent the required hundreds of hours studying algebra and then geometry and trigonometry and analysis and calculus and more calculus, coupled with almost as many hours studying other derivations, I actually could make sense of each equation. More amazing was the way that the equation eventually yielded to the persuasions of calculus and changing into a relatively simple equation that described the apparent force as it was related to the direction one was attempting to move with respect to the surface of the sphere.

The result is actually so simple, it can be described as follows: whenever one moves parallel to the surface of the earth in the northern hemisphere, one will experience an apparent force to move one to the right. In the southern hemisphere, the force is to the left. Most of us have now seen the graphic satellite time-lapse images of hurricanes and storm systems. They invariable rotate counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise down-under. This is because in a storm, the center is at a lower air pressure than the surrounding air, causing the air to rush toward the low pressure area. But on its way in, the Coriolis "force" pushes the air right so it eventually circles the low pressure point counter-clockwise. Winds around a high pressure rotate the other way as the air rushes away from the center and is bent right.

So what? I started this entry noting how Dr. Greene felt as he learned the ways of science. What I experienced was the deep internal logic of our universe that links all things at some level to all other things. Not only does this reveal remarkable things that we might never have imagined, but in the process it teaches us what remarkable minds we have (some would say, what remarkable minds God has given us). As one scientist put it, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. "

Teaching science, if it is taught correctly, should spark the sense of awe and wonder at this fact, that we can study just about anything in this vast collection of phenomena of our world, and by patient effort and the sharing of that effort with those who came before and who will come after, we can actually make sense of the whole thing, at least a little bit. If this does not spark wonder and joy at existence, then one has not properly comprehended the enterprise of science.

Soft Tissue, Dinosaur Bones, and Faith

2006-06-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've been catching up on my reading of Discover magazine, which is an excellent resource for keeping up with what science and scientists are doing. In the April 2006 issue, there is an article called Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery. This article illustrates the proper separation of science and religion, as well as an example of a scientist who is also religious and how science intersects with religion for her.

The scientist is Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist, and her discovery is what appears to be soft tissue preserved in dinosaur bones. She announced her discovery in the standard scientific way, by submitting articles for publication in scientific journals. Before a science article can be published, it is reviewed for evidence that the ideas are well thought out, that it is supported with evidence, and that the evidence was collected according to scientific standards. The article was published, because she did her science well, even though the idea of soft tissue surviving more than a few tens of thousands of years, not millions of years is widely assumed to be impossible. Science does not censor people whose ideas run counter to conventional wisdom.

Right away the idea was seized on by creationists and intelligent design proponents, who have jumped to the convenient, but as yet unfounded, conclusion that the dinosaur bones cannot be millions of years old, supporting, so they think, their religiously based ideas that the earth was created some six thousand years ago.

On the other side, there are scientists who refuse to believe she really found soft tissue. Schweitzer is quoted as saying, "I had one reviewer tell me that he didn't care what the data said, he knew that what I was finding wasn't possible. I wrote back and said, 'Well, what data would convince you?' And he said, 'None.'" That kind of close-mindedness is not good science. Many things that are commonplace in science today were thought absolutely impossible a generation or two ago.

Some people take the same attitude toward religious ideas, claiming there is no possible evidence for the existence of God or for the assertion that Jesus was God incarnate. The fundamentalists take the same attitude toward evolution and, implicitly, a host of other sciences whose findings fit in with evolution, such as geology, astronomy, and biochemistry. The mark of a true scientific attitude is to be able to imagine how some supposed truth could be disproved. Toward the beginning of the scientific exploration of evolution, one could imagine all sorts of things that could turn up in the earth or in the living animal and plant species, which would invalidate the hypothesis. Over time, nothing of the sort has been found. If one wants to believe God does not exist, he should be able to imagine what might shake his belief in this idea.

Schweitzer's attitude toward these things is admirable. As an evangelical Christian, she has felt pressure from creationists to promote their cause. She rejects this. Barry Yeoman, the article's author, describes it this way. "In her religious life, Schweitzer is no more of an ideologue than she is in her scientific career. In both realms, she operates with a simple but powerful consistency: The best way to understand the glory of the world is to open your eyes and take an honest look at what is out there."

When she talks about her faith, she says, "God is so multidimensional. I see a sense of humor. I see His compassion in the world around me. It makes me curious, because the creator is revealed in the creation." Regarding the idea that the world has evolved over billions of years, she finds this theologically exhilarating: "That makes God a lot bigger than thinking of Him as a magician that pulled everything out in one fell swoop."

Later in the article, Yeoman writes, "To Schweitzer, trying to prove your religious beliefs through empirical evidence is absurd, if not sacrilegious. 'If God is who He says He is, He doesn't need us to twist and contort scientific data,' she says. 'The thing that's most important to God is our faith. Therefore, he's not going to allow Himself to be proven by scientific methodologies.'"

Her discovery has only deepened her faith. She says, "My God has gotten so much bigger since I've been a scientist. He doesn't stay in my boxes."

This is someone who, in her scientific ideas and her religious faith, is willing to adjust her ideas as she learns more. Many scientists and religious leaders would do better to follow her example.

Science and Story-telling

2006-06-10T06:09:00.000-07:00

The following quote is from the May 2006 issue of Discover Magazine. It is from an interview with John McCarter, the chief executive officer and president of the Field Museum in Chicago. The questions focus on issues surrounding an exhibit now on display, "called the Evolving Planet, which takes visitors on a 4-billion-year journey that shows life on Earth developing from single-celled organisms to dinosaurs and finally to humans." Asked about the controversy introduced by intelligent design advocates, McCarter points out that the museum has an obligation to educate the public on what science has to say, using the technique of story-telling and placing their popular dinosaur displays in the context of this larger story.

Significant to me is the use of stories as the medium for education about science. Certainly, when trying to teach children, it is more effective to tell an interesting story than to present dry facts and figures. But this is a story not invented purely in human imagination. It is limited by the findings of science. But traditionally, going back into prehistory, stories have also been employed by religions, sometimes called myths. The reason for telling mythical stories by religions is the same as for the museum, people respond better to a good story than to dry metaphysical and theological exposition. (If you don't believe this, just try to read a little Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth.) It is not clear that all listeners of early mythical story-telling believed that the events of the stories actually happened. It is more likely that literal readings of myths came generations later by people who no longer had the intimate connections with the originator of the story.

This is not to say that the Chicago museum exhibit is trying to promote a religious response in the people who attend it. The story is an attempt to accurately interpret the evidence scientists have uncovered, as a way to understand the facts of our world's history and provide a basis for our place in the universe. If religion has a place, it is to take that story and place it into a broader story, one which moves closer to traditional religious myth-making, story-telling that reaches our emotions and motivates us to cooperate with our fellows. Science cannot do that, but it can provide a starting point for religion that is based in the objective rigors of science.

Fundamentalists have difficulty doing this because they are working from stories that were written thousands of years ago, meant to reach people with a very different view of the world. They do not feel free to alter these stories, to update them for our time. They are stuck with the same story, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Science does not tell us about God and the creation of the universe, but it can give a description of the creation of heaven and earth, in the form of the Big Bang, the evolution of stars and planets.

If this were the end of science's story, that might not be a problem for the fundamentalists, but the story goes on to the evolution of life over billions of years, with humans showing up in the latest sliver of geological time. The Genesis myth doesn't describe details, but it does make it clear that only man (sic) is made in the image of God. But biology tells us that the human is a near reflection of apes such as the chimpanzee. If we are the image of God, what does that make chimps? If we include other apes, do we also include monkeys? Where does it stop?

Science is not at heart creative. A good scientist lets the universe speak for itself. Darwin did not know about DNA (the atomic theory was not yet completely free of controversy in his day). He did not need to, however. Once we knew there were atoms, we understood chemistry, not by inventing it, but by looking at chemical reactions and inferring the structure. Once chemistry began to be understood, scientists asked, "What are the chemicals of living organisms?" In the first two decades of the 20th century, there was a strong debate in science about whether or not chemistry could be used to understand life. One group, called the mechanists, insisted that all matter was made of chemicals and that there was no reason to believe that the chemicals in a living organism operated under different laws from non-living matter. The other group, called the vitalists, claimed that something as complex as a living organism could never be explained by the laws of chemistry.

Sound familiar? It is just another version of the intelligent design crowd. Ironically, the current doubter's of sciences ability to explain species diversity, is drawing on the detailed biochemistry of current science. Intelligent design advocates are in effect saying the same thing as the vitalists. They are trying to draw a line in the sand and saying to science, "You can't cross this line." If you look behind the scientists, however, you see a great many lines drawn by previous generations telling scientists they could not cross those lines either. Galileo was told he could not cross the line and use science to understand the movements of the heavens. Others warned that the medicine could not treat illness using scientific method. Diseases were caused by evil spirits and sometimes by God as punishment for sins. Past the line that the vitalists drew, is the line that said human behavior could not be understood by biology, even if we find we can explain animal behavior. The mind cannot be studied by science to reveal anything about creativity, conscience, or the ability to speak. These are all, according to some religious line drawers, gifts from God, part of our nature that is in the image of God and hence fundamentally different from the brains and behaviors of animals.

Then scientists taught chimps how to talk using sign language.

I would like to give McCarter the last word, quoting his response to the following question: "What's the danger in meshing science and religion?"

Where we get in trouble as a society is when people of one persuasion or one capability jump into another field--when theologians come into science and attempt to reinterpret scientific records through supernatural intervention, and alternatively, when scientists go into theology and say "There is not God." It is really not the business of either. There should be a common dialogue, a middle ground where people can discuss issues like this as matters of philosophy as well as matters of theology and matters of science. We've lost a lot of that public discourse as we've moved to the frenetic, fast-paced life, with no time for reflection and discussion and debate.

Science and Christianity

2006-05-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

While it is important to remember that there is much more to religion than is encompassed by Christianity, Christianity and Science have a much more complex relationship than many other religions. I am also most familiar with Christianity, having grown up in a Christian household and community and having studied Christianity extensively in graduate school and out of personal interest. My experiences growing up and in adulthood with Christian congregations and colleagues have left no scars. I have always had a great deal of love and respect for the Christians I have known personally and for the churches to which I have belonged.

I became a Christian around my 4th grade year and did not seriously question that identity until my last year of undergraduate study. This questioning was inspired in part by my science studies (I was a Physics major) and in part with conversations with fundamentalists students.

I was raised in a liberal environment; my parents encouraged me to ask questions, to seek answers that made sense, and to think for myself. My father, who had served as a missionary and a minister prior to starting to raise a family, based his faith not on the Bible but on his experiences putting the commandments of Jesus into practice and following Jesus' example. He did not believe that every word of the Bible was divinely inspired or true. When a psalm of David calls on God to punish his enemies and to throw their babies into the air to land on spears, my father wrote in the margins, "Tsk, Tsk, David!" My father believed in the power of non-violence and knew that the power of God was in our ability to love even those who would do us harm. He knew this from experience, not just from some verses in the Bible.

I did not mingle with fundamentalists up until my last year of undergraduate study. At that time, I joined a group called Intravarsity Christian Fellowship. I went to services, retreats, and Bible studies with these people and appreciated their love and acceptance. But some of the things they got excited about, I found a bit disturbing. They touted Josh McDowell's book Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1972) as a must read that shows that the (fundamentalist) Christian ideas are based on irrefutable evidence.

I read the book and stopped about half-way through, when his logical fallacies became so blatent as to make the rest of his arguments worthless. (One critque of this book can be found here.) Up until this time, I knew that there were people who believed that every word of the Bible was true, but had never talked with anyone like this. I should point out that by this point I had read the Bible cover to cover, and many parts I had studied over and over again. I was familiar with the Bible and I knew a dozen reasons why the Bible was not the Word of God, at least not all of it. I also had some Philosophy of Religion coursework behind me.

Once it became known in the group that I disagreed with them about the Bible, several senior members of the group met with me to try to make me see things their way. What I came to see, instead, was why I would not be able to make Christianity the basis of my religious life. This is how my thinking evolved.

I had already rejected much of Paul's soteriology as irrational. He first says that no one but God can effect salvation, but then asserts that it is still the individual's fault, not God's, if someone is damned to hell. I did not see any of this justified in the Gospels, where Jesus often urges people to do what is right and even suggests that the key criteria for entry into heaven was a willingness to help the hungry, the sick, and the prisoners. He also urged love and forgiveness of enemies. So I could not really believe that the prospect of judgment and either heaven or hell was real.

But there are places where Jesus is quoted as saying that there will be some who will be thrown into the fires of hell. True, these words might have been put in Jesus' mouth, but I could not rule out that Jesus did include eternal damnation as a possibility. Could I be a follower of Jesus if he claimed that the God of love and forgiveness could mete out eternal punishment for sins that did not seem to justify such harshness?

Then I realized that in a way, the fundamentalists were right to insist on interpreting the Bible (or at least the New Testament) as a whole. The reason was that in order to understand the perspective of the authors, one must interpret their ideas in the context of their world view. They believed in a world that was created a few thousand years ago and expected it to end fairly soon. They saw human culture, and particularly the Hebrew segment, as foremost in the attention of God, who presided over the world as a ruler presides over his kingdom. Within that context, Jesus was a revolutionary, interjecting a trust in love and forgiveness that was rarely seen. But he was limited by the world view of those he ministered to.

Could we extract some essence from the teachings and example of Jesus into our present world view? Only the distinctly ethical aspects. Everything about the nature of the world and metaphysics cannot be translated; the difference in world view is too great. While I could define my Christian identity by this particular filter, I knew that the majority of Christians, even the liberal Christians, would not agree with me. It saddened me, for I had a great love for my Christian friends and family, and I did not willingly remove myself from their community.

Nevertheless, I continued attending Christian services for the next 16 years before discovering Unitaritan Universalism, which perfectly embraced the same respect for science and religion in a process of spiritual discovery and growth.

I will elaborate on the problems facing Christianity because of this shift in world view in future posts.

Greatest Story Ever Told

2006-05-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

The March 2006 issue of National Geographic contains an article called "The Greatest Journey." The author, James Shreeve, begins the article with these words: "Everybody loves a good story, and when it's finished, this will be the greatest one ever told."

Shreeve is not talking about Jesus or Moses or anything else from the Bible. He's talking about the scientific effort to unravel our human past, using our genes like an archeologist uses a dig. Shreeve describes the story next. "It begins in Africa with a group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps just a few hundred strong. It ends some 200,000 years later with their six and a half billion descendants spread across the Earth, living in peace or at war, believing in a thousand different deities or none at all, their faces aglow in the light of campfires and computer screens."

Then Shreeve lists the questions the scientists hope to answer: "Who were those first modern people in Africa? What compelled a band of their descendants to leave their home continent as little as 50,000 years ago and expand into Eurasia? What routes did they take? Did they interbreed with earlier members of the human family along the way? When and how did humans first reach the Americas?"

And here, in my opinion is the fascinating part: Shreeve asks, "In sum: Where do we all come from? How did we get to where we are today?"

I consider these two of the important questions which religion has always tried to answer. Science has already discovered some tentative answers, suggesting humans first evolved in Africa and then migrated and spread gradually across Eurasia and from there to Australia and the Americas.

Fundamentalist Christians and Jews scoff at such talk. They believe they know the truth based on the Bible, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the part of the story prior to Abraham migrating to Canaan. They don't care how many bones are found, how old they are, how coherently these finds fit the broad strokes of the story Shreeve is summarizing. The don't care about corroborating evidence in our genes.

How sad that these people are closing their minds to revelation. They claim they have already found revelation and that it only happened in the dim and distant past and only to one group of people. If God reveals anything to us, it is through our minds and if God is a universal God, it will be available to each and every one of us. Using our minds, scientists worldwide are putting their heads together, digging, discussing, proving and disproving (sometimes dying), and after several hundred years of this, we have gone from one set of ideas about our place in the cosmos, to one that is so different that it is hard to find anything of the old world view left. Only the fundamentalists doggedly cling to their Bibles and ignore the voice of God speaking clearly in our midst.

If one cannot find a basis for a religious mindset in the world view of science, one is not really trying. How much more awe-inspiring a story could one want?

Consider that science now tells the following story about how we got here. It goes back much farther than what Shreeve is covering, although it includes that. In the beginning, there was light. Then some of that light coalesced into matter, hydrogen and helium, two simple units themselves constructed of a set of simpler units. This matter and energy moved (and still moves) through time evidencing a few simple patterns. Opposite charges attract. Like charges repel. All matter attracts. Plus a few more.

The hydrogen and helium combined to form stars. In the stars formed more matter, still made up of the same three units, but now numbering in the dozens, including iron, oxygen, and sodium. Then there was more light, as some of these stars exploded and created even more elements, throwing them out haphazardly, like a farmer scattering seeds this way and that.

More came together, this time, with stars and planets. On the planets, as things cooled, the elements began to come together in new ways, making more complex units: molecules. Some of these were very simple, like oxygen gas, just two oxygen atoms. Others, just slightly more complicated, like water, behave in radically different ways from oxygen gas. Water is the most amazing of these compounds. Oxygen will be important too.

With more time and a lot of mixing of chemicals, some planets had just the right amount of sun and water to allow every more complex compounds. Maybe only one planet in a hundred billion had the conditions essential for the start of life, but even so, there are so many that our history has surely been repeated with minor variations all over the cosmos, for we find that the most important and astonishing thing about this is that all of this works the same across the vast universe. Simple things combining and evolving into more complicated things, which in turn combine more and the levels of complexity begin to stack.

The start of life was probably very gradual, almost impossible to place the dividing line. Simple things interacted and ended up replicating the same pattern, multiplying it. From here the laws of evolution began to really kick in (see my entry defining evolution for more). This process happens without evidence of a conscious, willful planning or design—things are done, but there is no doer. Yet there is amazing creativity in the spectrum of life that has evolved from such humble beginnings.

Instead of everything being created more or less at once, everything has an ancestor and we can understand each plant and animal in terms of the lines leading back in time and space to this universal beginning. Somewhere in here, our ancestors began forming social groups, supporting each other, making things—some useful, some just interesting—all the while growing in awareness and in that awareness began the questions which religion and now science would try to answer.

And so it goes on up to the present. Note that you have a place in this story, no matter where you live in the world. No matter who your ancestors were, somewhere in the past, they coincide with my ancestors. Water is the same amazing substance the world over. And we all cry when we lose someone we greatly love.

That is the greatest story there is to tell. We should embrace it, write symphonies about it, dramatize it in our religious rituals, tell the story to our children and watch as they grow up and tell the story, perhaps slightly changed by that time, to their children. Does this story lack anything that we need to feel excited to be part of the cosmos, to want to lead lives that honor our amazing heritage? Perhaps, but that we will discuss later.

World View in Science and Religion

2006-05-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

When people find out I have degrees in both physics and religion, they often ask whether this is not something of a contradiction. Many people assume that science and religion are somehow inherently at odds. I believe science is only at odds with certain instances of religion. Many religions exist which consider science or at least the scientific method to be important, even essential. Other religious traditions developed before the rise of modern science but have found nothing objectionable in the world view that science has provided.

What is a world view? It is pretty much what the term implies, how one views or thinks about the world. In this context, the world really means the universe, which really means everything that exists (not just the physical universe of science). There is a pretty good definition at the Principia Cybernetic Web. The web site presents one group’s world view based on scientific principles.

Quoting from this article, here is what a world view should do:

It should allow us to understand how the world functions and how it is structured. "World" here means the totality, everything that exists around us, including the physical universe, the Earth, life, mind, society and culture. We ourselves are an important part of that world. Therefore, a world view should also answer the basic question: "Who are we?".

Another way of putting it is to say that a world view explains who we are, how we got here, and what is our place in the cosmos. As I have argued elsewhere, this is what religion evolved to do, in particular to help us live productive lives that help ensure social cohesion and hence survival of all things human. Other animals don’t need this. Instinct has provided them with a set of responses for every situation they are likely to encounter. But humans evolved to take advantage of both the benefits of social living and also the adaptability to migrate to other places, other environments.

So we evolved thinking, that is, making a mental model of our environment and sharing that model through language. As our mental capabilities evolved, so did the complexity of our model of the world. Religion evolved to link the demands of social living (essentially ethics) to the most awesome and mysterious elements of the world. It provided a world view.

Different religions provided different world views. In earlier, simpler times, everyone in a community had the same religion and hence understood the world in the same way. This world view had to account for many important physical aspects of the world: weather, natural disasters, agriculture, sex, birth, life, disease, and death. Before the advent of modern science, people made use of the dominant form of logic at the time: analogical reasoning.

Analogical reasoning means using familiar experiences to solve a problem in a less familiar domain. For ancient people, things got done in society by following the will of the leaders. They reasoned that in the natural world it must be the same way. They imagined gods and goddesses, powers and principalities, willful beings of great power, making things happen in the world: causing rain, disease, nurturing life, designing the world, and determining what people should be doing in it. At least that is how most religions saw things.

Science set out to determine what it could about a part of the world. It limited itself to things that could be objectively observed. Galileo’s problems with the Church were in part because his scientific findings contradicted a portion of the world view of the Church, that the earth was the center of the universe. A few hundred years later, the Church finally admitted that Galileo was right.

Science has never claimed it would provide a replacement for the world view provided by religion. But over the course of several centuries, it has rewritten 90% of what the Western religions thought they knew for certain about the world. This is why some religions, especially Western religions, are having such a hard time maintaining themselves at present. It is also why the most hard-core fundamentalists are so distrustful of science, particularly biological science, which has radically repositioned the alleged centerpiece of God’s creation: human beings.

People in the West tend to think of religion purely in terms of the Western traditions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But there are many other religions. Some of these may have started out with similar ideas of spirits and powers controlling nature, but they evolved world views that did not involve monotheism.

Taoism, for example, taught that the universe was created and maintained by the Tao, which translates roughly as the Way or better, the Way of Nature. Confucius, likewise, did not conceive of the Absolute as a personal deity, but as Heaven and Earth, which we would simply call the Universe. Humans are not told by a God how to behave, but have to discover what to do by seeking their humanity in relationships. Buddhism holds a world view in which each person must discover the truth about our place in the cosmos through experience, not through professing a creed or performing a ritual and abiding by rules.

All of these religions have world views which integrate relatively well with the modern world view of science. So I do not hold that Science and Religion are at odds. They merely have different world views. Another important difference: Science does not attempt to integrate into the world view things which cannot be objectively observed. Yet I believe, as do most people, that there is more to reality than what science can observe. Just as radio waves go undetected without a way to translate them into something we can observe, so does religion need to translate the unobservable portion of the universe into something we can understand.

No religion can hope to provide a complete picture of our place in the cosmos without integrating the world view of science. Those religions that resist this task do a disservice to their adherents. Those that attempt to utilize science without religion may be seriously handicapped by their unwillingness to consider more to reality than what we can see and touch. Science and Religion must complement each other.

How Do You Know?

2006-04-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

Try this. Think of something that you know. It can be anything: 2+2 = 4, cats have four legs, light is an electromagnetic wave, love of money is the root of all evil, God is Love. Ask yourself how you would respond if someone asked you to justify how you know that. What allows you to assert this as fact or truth?

Once you have an answer, take that assertion and repeat the question, “How do you know?” If you can come up with a response, ask the question again. Keep going until you reach a point where you cannot justify your certainty.

If you do this honestly, you can learn a lot about yourself and the world. In some cases, such as 2+2=4 or cats have four legs, you quickly come to the direct experience of the idea, either counting on your fingers or pointing to a cat and counting its legs. In other cases, you instead work your way back to trust in the observations of others. This is often true of scientific statements, since they are often based on other people’s reports of their experiments and mathematical computations.

Statements of a moral or metaphysical nature take you back to ideas that you believe but cannot justify, sometimes called faith. The main difference between faith assertions and scientific assertions, however, is that faith assertions of one group of people often contradict the assertions of other groups. Christians believe Jesus was God incarnate, while Jews believe that no man can be God incarnate. Moslems believe the Koran was inspired by God, while the Christians look to the Bible, and the Mormons to the Book of Mormon. Hindus believe in reincarnation, Christians and Moslems in an afterlife of heaven and hell. Others are certain there is no afterlife.

When we talk about how we know what we know, we are talking about epistemology, the study of knowledge. One of the important ways in which science is different from many religions is that science clearly defines a method for evaluating the truth of scientific assertions. First, scientific statements are limited to those which can be verified or falsified by some kind of observation, preferably some sort of measurement. Then experiments are performed with these observations in mind. Finally, the results, whether they verify or falsify the hypothesis, must be replicated by other observers attempting the same experiment.

A famous example of this was the idea that light waves travel through something called ether, a substance that was virtually unobservable. But if there was such an ether, then certain experiments with light waves moving in different directions would reveal different speeds for light to travel the same distance, just as airplanes take different times to travel the same distance depending on whether they have a tail wind or a head wind. Experiments were done and no difference was found. More experiments were done by others, taking care to be more and more precise in measuring the speed of light in different directions. No matter how precise the measurements, however, speed of light did not vary. Then came Einstein who asserted a new hypothesis: the speed of light will be measured the same no matter which direction one is traveling with respect to the light. He dispensed with the ether and no one seriously believes in ether anymore. Of course, Einstein’s assertion had to be tested as well before it became well accepted. (For details, search on “Michelson Morley Experiment”.)

With some religions, the situation is very different. For fundamentalist Christians, for example, just about anything they assert to be true will ultimately come down to a quote from their Bible. Ask how they know that the Bible is always right, and they will answer that it is a matter of faith. The problem is that the assertions of a fundamentalist Moslem will invariably come down to a quote from the Koran. How does he know the Koran is always right? Faith. Fundamentalist Jews would point to a different set of scriptures as the thing they know by faith. Mormons: the book of Mormon. All these assertions cannot be correct, so each one ought to acknowledge that his faith could be wrong. Fundamentalists don’t believe they are wrong, however; all the other fundamentalists are wrong in their faith. They can’t prove this, of course. They just know it.

Or, I believe, they don’t know it. They just believe it. Knowledge is tricky like that.

Another important difference between the fundamentalist faithful and the scientists is that the scientists are willing to admit that what they think they know could be wrong. Furthermore, the scientist can distinguish between things that are quite certain will not turn out to be wrong and things that could very well be wrong. It all depends on how much evidence there is for an idea. Gravity: lots of observations for over four hundred years have always found the acceleration of gravity to be a constant value of 9.8 meters per second per second. The existence of dark matter is a lot less certain, since there is only evidence that seems to require this odd type of matter that cannot be seen but exists and has mass enough to change the rotation of galaxies. It reminds one a lot of the ether.

But religions are not all like the fundamentalists. Buddhism, for example, disdains the assertion of faith. Buddha insisted that people should not believe his teaching just because they were his teachings. He insisted that people needed to experience the truth and believe it because of the experience. This is a lot like science. The main difference is that the truths of Buddhism have to be observed as part of subjective experience, unmediated by measurements or descriptions.

Confucius was also a great believer in direct experience. In his case, he believed that we must explore our own relationships with our family, friends, and neighbors to discover our essential humanity. The idea can be found in many different religions, especially the mystically inclined traditions.

There is a big difference between religions that insist that people accept certain ideas on faith and those that insist people discover the truth for themselves. While science may not attempt to make assertions about mysticism, metaphysics, or morality, it has in common with religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, and others that it values direct experience over inherited statements. That is very important to remember when studying the differences of various religions and the degree to which they state the truth about the world.

What Makes a Religion Successful?

2006-04-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

One of the powers of science is the power to explain why things are the way the are. Most people are grateful that science has helped us understand why we get sick, how we get well, what causes the weather, why does water float when it freezes, etc. But people often resent science for trying to explain other things, such as why do we behave as we do, why do humans and gorillas so closely resemble each other, which sayings attributed to Jesus most likely were said by him, and, my topic for today, why is a religion successful. People like to think that there are some things that science cannot or should not explore.

I obviously don’t share that opinion. I think that science may never explain why we find a Mozart symphony so pleasant, but I don’t resent science from trying to understand the nuances of aesthetic pleasure. Not only are there practical benefits to understanding why things happen (such as giving us the ability to predict when a volcano may erupt) but often benefits shows up even where they are not expected. Perhaps understanding why we find Mozart’s music so pleasant will help diagnose autism in children or even cure it.

So when looking at religion through a lens of science, we are not so much seeking to displace religion or disprove it, but to better understand it. I believe that doing so will make us able to take a conscious, creative role in the religions we practice rather than simply being forced to accept them as they are or reject them out of hand.

So what makes a religion successful? I will build on my proposal that religions are found in all early societies because religion plays a crucial role in the ability of early societies to survive. To recap that idea, remember that science has demonstrated that cooperation among a group of creatures can greatly enhance their ability to survive. For some creatures, such as ants, this cooperation is built into their behavior. But for humans, we also enjoy the survival benefit of being able to think and choose our behavior, thus allowing us to adapt to the environment. This means we have to dispense with instinct.

But we already have certain instincts from our earlier evolution, including an instinct for personal survival and a kind of innate selfishness that runs contrary to cooperation. It is religion’s role to motivate people to cooperate by linking ethical behavior to aspects of our experience that are powerful, mysterious, and sometimes frightening. This is why we find that most religions have very similar ethical teachings, while their metaphysical and theological basis can be quite dissimilar. From the standpoint of survival, it only matters that people cooperate. If they are motivated to do this because they fear that they will suffer in the afterlife if they don’t, then society will be better able to survive. It does not matter if there is an afterlife as depicted by the religion. What matters is the cooperation.

Let’s look at a variety of religions and how they have motivated good behavior. Christianity and its close cousins Judaism and Islam, use two ideas in tandem to motivate cooperation. First, they all link success and happiness in this life to living a virtuous life. In the Hebrew Bible, whenever the society is successful and thriving, it is because they are doing what God requires. When they suffer calamity, it is because they have sinned. This idea persists to this day in these religions. People who suffer a terrible lose due to accident or illness wonder if they are being punished by God for some sin.

The second motivating tool used by all of the major Western religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, is the promise of a happy afterlife for the good people and suffering in hell for the wicked. This idea appears to have developed somewhat later in the Hebrew religion, perhaps when people began to notice that often very wicked people lived life devoid of serious suffering, while people who were very pious sometimes suffered terribly. Job is the classic example of people struggling with this, for he was described as a man of perfect virtue, yet God let Satan take everything away from Job except his life. This launches a pious attempt to understand this circumstance. Today we still see people predicting that those who are not Christian (or Moslem) will burn in hell, while the good Christian (or Moslem) will enjoy a paradise in heaven.

We are so saturated by these two perspectives that we may not realize that there are religions that have very different ideas about why people should do good for others as well as for themselves. Hinduism and Buddhism use the idea of reincarnation as a motivator to goodness. The virtuous person can be reborn into another life with better circumstances, until born into a situation in which he can achieve a state of union with the Absolute and escape the cycle of birth and death. This idea has sometimes also been used to justify a caste system that justifies inequality and prejudice, but it succeeds so long as it motivates people to accept this system and to cooperate.

In China, Confucius claimed it was not important to understand what happens in the afterlife. Living a life of virtue had its own rewards which motivated the good person. The reward for observing the golden rule and attending with respect and love to the needs of ones family and neighbors brought the benefit of a harmonious society free of war and poverty. This is perhaps a religion that has actually achieved the purest link between virtue and the broader universe. It degenerated to some extent until the afterlife came to be a place where people were happy so long as their ancestors continued to honor their memory.

So we see that successful religions are not identical. They can all preach a similar ethic without all being equally correct in their teachings about why we should behave well. Furthermore, as humans developed more complex societies, the link between survival and cooperation became less important, meaning that religions could deviate from their role of motivating good behavior. A religion can become corrupt and actually promote bad behavior or at least tolerate bad behavior by people of privilege. I believe we still see the importance of ethics in the rise and fall of great civilizations. When a society becomes so class conscious and so unjust, it may well cease to function and either fall prey to invaders or experience a religious revolt. The fall of Rome is an example of the former, the Protestant Reformation is an example of the latter.

This leads to the question of how we decide which religion, if any is actually correct in its method of motivating cooperation. This will be the topic of my next post.

Evolution Defined

2006-03-24T17:29:00.000-08:00

Since evolution will play an important part in the ideas I will be expressing in this blog, and since many do not understand evolution at all, let me define what evolution is.

Evolution happens under certain conditions. This is not a theory but an observation of how the world works. "Evolution" is just the name we give to a particular process. Consider the idea of acceleration. No one says acceleration is just a theory, because it describes a common phenomena of objects in motion changing their velocity. Acceleration only enters into the realm of theory when it is part of a hypothesis about the way things work, like Newton's theories of motion (now considered fact, since they have been so well demonstrated).

So what is evolution?

Evolution is what happens when four conditions exist.

1) There exists a large population of entities (not necessarily living organisms) which are similar in most respects, but not identical.

2) These entities get replaced over time with copies of themselves, copies which are similar but not necessarily identical to the original.

3) Some condition exists which causes entities to reproduce or replicate to different degrees based on some difference in their makeup.

4) Those entities that reproduce more readily gradually come to dominate the population, in terms of numbers, and over time, the overall characteristics of the population shift.

This can be demonstrated in a number of ways. The most important way is in the human project of breeding domesticated animals with certain traits. Horses have been bred so that some are huge, strong draft animals, while others are lithe and fast, and others are diminutive. This was done by selective breeding (condition number 3). It is the same process that biologists know happens in nature, it having been observed in the wild and in the lab. It can also be demonstrated with computer programs, manufactured items, and ideas.

So evolution happens. That which is commonly called the "theory of evolution" is really a theory about the diversity of the species of plants and animals found on earth now and in the past. This theory posited that wherever the four conditions exist, plants and animals can be expected to change because of this process of evolution.

Scientists have found so much evidence for natural selection or evolution of species that they no longer consider it to be "just a theory." It is an established fact. The only questions remaining are how the process works. This will come up again and again in this blog because evolution is how the universe works. It will have to be taken into account to have the possibility of the development of religion that can effectively link the moral issues facing us to the eternal truths of the cosmos.

What is Religion?

2006-03-18T05:25:00.000-08:00

For an excellent overview of various attempts to define religion and some critiques of these definitions, see the website of Religious Tolerance.org. They point out that many definitions exclude as much as they include.

For example, one definition says: "Human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal God entitled to obedience" [from the concise Oxford Dictionary, 1990]. Where does a religion like Buddhism fit in this definition? What about all the people who see God as something other than a lawgiver?

I agree with the criticisms expressed by the Religious Tolerance.org web page, but I have a problem with their definition as well. They say that “Religion is any specific system of belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, and a worldview. (A worldview is a set of basic, foundational beliefs concerning deity, humanity and the rest of the universe.)”

This definition includes a wide range of religions but has the drawback of focusing on ideas rather than function. It begs the question of why religion is such a widespread phenomenon that we find in every culture and every time. I think the function of religion is imbedded in their definition when they mention ethics and worldview.

All ancient cultures have religion because until very recently, religion served to aid in the survival of a group of people by encouraging cooperation by individuals who by instinct would act selfishly. It turns out that the best way to motivate people to overcome innate instincts toward self-preservation is to link cooperative behavior (ethics) to forces in the universe that are awe-inspiring and powerful. This link between ethics and worldview is found in every religion.

I will develop specific justification for aspects of this thesis in other entries. Here let me just note that most religions have very similar ethics. True there are some variations when it comes to marriage or diet, but where is the religion that does not condemn stealing, greed, and murder? Where is the religion that does not encourage love for one’s family and fellows? These things are universal in religion because they are necessary for survival. For early tribes of humans, survival meant that everyone had to cooperate and share resources (hence stealing is discouraged and sharing encouraged). The strong helped the weak survive. Families had to make sure children grew up physically and ethically strong. Conflicts had to be settled without violence as much as possible.

The second thing that is obvious about religions is that they have very different worldviews. Some believe in a personal god, some in gods and goddesses, some in an impersonal absolute (such as Buddha or Tao). Some describe a single afterlife divided into heaven and hell, while others teach reincarnation. Some describe a single creation and predict a specific end to the cosmos, while others teach that there is an eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

The things that tend to vary with religion are precisely the worldview elements that cannot be objectively proven. The things that tend to be the same are the concrete needs of individuals and society to know how to fit in and be a contributing member of a society.

Because of this, I believe that religion has a function in society which links the worldview of the society to healthy social cooperation. Religion helps people to identify with other members of the society, to treat them as they want to be treated, to understand their place and role. Religion guides individuals through the transitional stages of life, childhood to adulthood, single to married, childbirth, old age, and death.

Generally, one religion has dominated a society, so that people did not choose their religion, they were born into it. Sometimes one culture would conquer another and force a change in religion. As society has become more complex and interrelated, it has become possible for multiple religions to coexist and this raises new issues for each religion.

The situation became more complicated with the advent of science, which developed and changed the worldview component of a culture without directly dealing with the ethical component. Hence, Galileo wanted to change the way the culture thought about the planets and the mechanics of the solar system. He did not want to challenge the idea of how to be a good Christian. But the conservatives in the church recognized (perhaps without being conscious of it) that to fiddle with the worldview was to alter the way religion would have to function to continue to link ethics to worldview. So they opposed Galileo. (The situation is more complex but this gets at an important element in the persecution of science in Galileo’s time.)

Today, we have a very different worldview from what existed as Christianity (and all the other traditional religions) developed. Some Christians have tried to let the religion change and evolve with this change in worldview, while others have resisted it. Those who resist may be given credit for attempting to maintain a vital element of culture, the promotion of cooperation through religion (they rarely would think of their efforts in this way, of course). But they illustrate Einstein’s statement that religion without science is blind.

The challenge is how to maintain a viable religion that can still help a person through the transitions of life and promotes cooperation but that links these to the new worldview of modern science. I was raised in a liberal Protestant environment and tried mightily to reconcile the essence of the teachings and example of Jesus with the current scientific worldview. I conclude that this is impossible without changing the focus of Christianity away for Jesus and onto more universal principles that Jesus espoused and practiced but did not originate. How can a religion do this and still call itself Christianity? I think it is impossible.

But I’m not inclined to conclude, as many scientifically minded people do, that there is no further need for religion now that we have science. We still need to nurture in people a sense of belonging in this cosmos and a sense of ethics to keep us from destroying ourselves with war and ecological disaster. For this we need religion. It may be impossible to do this with religions like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.

We either need to adopt a different tradition, one that can act in harmony with the current scientific worldview and promote cooperation and a sense of belonging; or we need to develop a new religion (or new religions) that can do this.

Albert Einstein: Religious Scientist

2006-03-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. --Albert Einstein

Today, March 14, is Albert Einstein's birthday. Einstein's legacy to the world ought to be well known to everybody. Most can quote the E equals M C squared, even if they don't know what it really means. Einstein's attitude toward religion is less well known.

Einstein was Jewish, but he never observed the religion of Judaism. This did not mean he was an atheist, only that he did not regard any traditional religion has having anything he felt was worth practicing. So what does he mean that "science without religion is lame"?

Einstein did refer to God, although he has a different concept of God than a Christian or Jew usually has. He objected to the probabilistic definition of sub-atomic particles that was the basis of quantum mechanics by saying, "God does not play dice with the universe." Einstein's God was a non-personal concept of the Absolute that transcends what we can observe in the physical universe. God is responsible for the universe, but is not a player in the universe. One might add that God does not play chess with the universe, that is making things happen as a chess player moves chess pieces.

So what is the basis of religion for Einstein? He cited the need to base religion not in scriptures but in the feeling of awe that comes from properly understanding the universe. What most people experience staring up at the night sky and the Milky Way, Einstein experienced in equations and the way all the laws of the universe come together to create the intricate web of life and death that we experience.

I experienced that awe while studying physics in college. I sat in lectures copying down the equations that the professor wrote on the board. It would start with some general law of motion, for example, and then would have some mathematical transformations applied to allow the equation to be solved. Staring at the lines of letters (most of them Greek), numbers, and other symbols, it looked like nonsense; but I understood it, because I had spent the years learning algebra and calculus that form the basis of the equations. After some twenty revisions of the equation, a solution would emerge, much like a blurry image coming into focus. The equation described things that we could observe in the real world.

Time after time I had this experience over five or six years. After so much evidence for the interrelatedness of the universe, it is impossible not to be in awe of the way it all works. Nowhere in all of this did we need to introduce a term that represents the will of God. God's will, if it exists, would be seen in the universe as a whole, not specific events.

Einstein pointed out that God was not concerned with ethics, meaning that God did not do as described in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and cause events to happen based on whether or not the people obeyed ethical requirements or not. But he stressed that we human beings need to be very concerned with ethics, since the way we live has serious implications for our quality of life. This is what he meant by "science without religion is blind."

Einstein did not describe in detail how the religion of awe at the universe translates into an ethic that allows science to see the ethical consequences of discoveries and applications of those discoveries. He did stress that this was the role of art.

I will write more about how I think the picture of the universe provided by science can be incorporated into a religion that utilizes art and education to promote the best quality of life for all people. As I do, I will draw inspiration and courage from the example of Albert Einstein.

Happy birthday, Albert!

Introduction

2006-03-13T23:43:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a liberal Christian community in Indiana. I embraced Christianity from an early age and participated joyfully in all sorts of church activities. I briefly considered becoming a minister but then I discovered physics. I decided to major in physics in college. By the time I graduated, I had realized that my childhood acceptance of Christianity could not endure in the face of what I had learned about the universe.

The doctrines of Christianity, even in a liberal interpretation, was inextricably linked to the world-view of the first century, which saw the earth as a flat disk with a dome of sky over it, surrounded by the planets and stars, beyond which was God. The earth was the center of the universe and human beings were the center of God's attention. The whole thing had only been around a few thousand years and was not expected to last much longer. They knew next to nothing about the other people of the world nor of the true history of the universe. Things happened because God (or gods) and spirits caused them to happen, often in response to what people believed and the rituals they performed.

Now we know that the earth is not the center of the solar system, much less of the cosmos. We are but one in countless trillions of solar systems across an unimaginably large universe. Our stay on earth stretches into the millions of years but that is but a tiny fraction of the age of the universe. Humans came to be by the same forces as shaped all the rest of the species on the planet. The laws of the universe are universal and available to anyone who looks with an open mind and an inventive spirit. And the perspective of the early Hebrews and Christians are but one of hundreds of other cultures that have survived and thrived over the centuries all around the earth. Things happen because of universal laws. These laws have nothing to do with the things people do, except in the case of pollution of the environment.

How to reconcile this view of the universe with even the most liberal interpretation of the first century? Even if Jesus were God incarnate, he would have to communicate using the accepted view of the universe of that time. The universe we live in is a marvel and a wonder, but it is nothing like what the people of 1st century Palestine understood. Such a radically different universe demands a radically different religion.

By the time I started graduate school, I no longer felt called to be a physicist. I wanted to explore the world of religion. I wanted to see what other religions had to say about our place in the cosmos and how to live a life in harmony with the universe that science is revealing. By the time I had earned my Ph.D. in religion and social ethics, I had found many possibilities for religion in harmony with science. I also better understood the perspective of those religions that tried to deny the findings of science. In the years since, I’ve explored this further.

I am now a member of the Unitarian Universalist religion, one of the few religions to take the contributions of science seriously. I have developed adult religious education classes to share these ideas with my congregation and have also presented a number of worship services around the themes of science and religion.

I hope in this blog to get some of my ideas out into wider circulation and interact with those in the blog0sphere who are interested in the relation of science and religion. While my perspective is distinctly liberal, I encourage respectful comments from the conservative side of this issue. As time goes on, I hope the various categories of posts will begin to provide a comprehensive overview of this complex and fascinating issue.