Two 14-year-old Girls

     Not long after I wrote my last post on insulting the prophet, I heard a debate on the radio that raised my free-speech hackles a bit. One participant took the position that people should be criminally liable for speech or symbolic acts that they know are likely to result in violence, such as burning a copy of the Koran. She articulated the principle in terms of causality, which is what I found troubling, because it seems to me that to assign moral blame to the speaker for how an audience reacts is to deny (or at the very least dilute) the responsibility of audiences to react appropriately. Even if an inappropriate response is predictable, I am reluctant to blame the speaker, except in cases of fraud or deception.

     As if to make that point clear, last week the Taliban attempted to assassinate a fourteen year old girl, Malala Yousufzai, for her audacious and heretical suggestion that girls should be educated. The Taliban have made it very clear that they intend to respond with violence to such advocacy; it was therefore reasonable to anticipate that if Malala were to continue speaking out in favour of girls' education, she would be targeted. And yet we view her (rightly in my mind) as blameless in this, and in fact we praise her for her courage. The blame, all of the blame, falls squarely on the shoulders of the ignorant zealots who tried to kill her. They did wrong, not she. 

     The same week, a successful attempt on the life of a different fourteen year old girl was made, unfortunately by someone less inept than the Taliban: Amanda Todd committed suicide after ruthless bullying. 

     The juxtaposition of these two girls and their circumstances leaves me greatly conflicted. On the one hand, I feel very strongly that Malala did nothing wrong, and that nothing she said justified any act of violence whatsoever. At the same time, though, I have great sadness and sympathy for Amanda, and anger at her abusers. And there's the conflict, because ultimately she was the one who decided to kill herself, in response to abuse which at its core was speech. (I know she had been punched and blackmailed, but I will go out on a limb and speculate that it was the insistent display of hatred and moral condemnation more than anything else that drove her to such misery.) Did I not just conclude, before being confronted with this case, that speakers are not to be held morally responsible for the inappropriate reactions of their audiences, even if they are predictable? If Malala was blameless for the attempt on her life, even though it was predictable that Taliban zealots would react with inappropriate violence, how do I still feel anger at Amanda's bullies, for her inappropriate reaction of self-directed violence?

     I've struggled with this, and for a while I thought I could explain it this way: The bullies are not to blame for her death, but for something very nearly as evil. They are to blame for treating her with such devastating cruelty as to make her miserable enough to want to die, and that's plenty blameworthy enough.

     But I'm not sure that rationalization really does the trick, either. After all, Malala's speech clearly caused great distress to the poor sensitive Taliban, hurting their delicate feelings or their religious sensibilities or whatever badly enough to provoke them to violence, and yet I have almost no sympathy whatsoever for them and their reaction, whereas I do have sympathy for Amanda.

     The real answer, I think, is uglier. I said above that only in the case of fraud or deception can we blame speakers for the actions of their audience, and I think we have all deceived Amanda and each other. Malala spoke truthfully and frankly; she said she believed girls deserve to be educated, and the Taliban assassins could have tried to reason with her and her audience, to explain why she was wrong and to convince us all that no, after all, girls ought not to be educated. But they didn't do that. They surrendered the moral high ground and shot her instead.

     In contrast, Amanda's bullies told her, through their words and actions, that she was worthless and bad and deserved to die. Some creep manipulated her into showing her bare chest to him online, but we told her, collectively, that was something for her to be ashamed of. We empowered him to blackmail and humiliate her, by making a federal case out of "wardrobe malfunctions", by making it a big deal, a grave moral concern. In short, we told her a lie that she believed, and on that basis killed herself. We've got to stop telling that lie, and I suppose the first step there is to stop believing it ourselves. 

Insulting the Prophet

What does it mean to insult someone?

We're all familiar with the basic schoolyard approach to insults.  They usually involve making some outrageous unflattering claim, often about the target's dietary or sexual practices, as a result of which presumably we are to hold the target in lower esteem. Personally, I was never much offended by the content of this sort of insult, nor much impressed by those who uttered them, perhaps because I have a tendency to interpret and analyze things literally. If someone alleges that I mate with iguanas, I'm more likely to be puzzled than offended: such a preposterous claim should reflect more on his credibility than my respectability.

Even in those instances where what was revealed about someone happened to be true, ("Billy's wearing green underwear!") it never made much sense to me that this should embarrass Billy. After all, we probably assumed he was wearing underwear, and it had to be some colour. I'd have thought it more embarrassing to be seen as having any interest in knowing the colour of Billy's underwear, and thus I always felt it was the insulter who should be embarrassed rather than the insulted. And I always felt just a little bit insulted as a member of the audience to such games, because the insulter who gleefully tells me the colour of Billy's underwear is implying through that speech act that I am expected to care.

That's the sort of thing that insults me. Not words, not statements of belief that I am unworthy, but clear demonstrations of that belief. You may say that you believe I am an idiot, and that's fine; you've presented a proposition which may be true or false, and put your own credibility on the line if I prove to be otherwise. But when you act in such a way that shows you fully expect me to behave like an idiot, when you tell me something obviously false and expect me to believe it or expect to convince me with a ridiculously flawed argument, that is something I can't help taking as an insult to my intelligence. When a grandmother's knitting needles are confiscated by airport security to protect me, it's an insult to my courage. When women are expected to dress modestly for fear their beauty will incite me to rape them, it's an insult to either my virility or my self-restraint or both. 

(Of course, if I am an idiot or a coward or an untrustworthy dangerous animal, it may be perfectly appropriate to treat me as such.)

And so what does it mean to insult Islam or its prophet or indeed any religion? Who or what should feel insulted, when someone makes a satirical film or a cartoon depicting the Prophet in an unflattering way? If what is said is false, well, does this not reflect poorly on the speaker more than it does upon the Prophet, and call for no more punishment than being revealed for a fool or a liar? And if what is said should be true, then it is either irrelevant and nobody's business (as in the case of Billy's underwear) or it is a relevant and legitimate criticism, in which case it is perfectly appropriate to act in accordance with it.

Actions speak louder than words. When, claiming to act on behalf of Islam, you storm an embassy and murder people because someone else thousands of miles away made a fool of himself, you demonstrate that you believe Mohammed to be an arrogant, vindictive and thin-skinned bully who resorts to violence rather than reason. If that belief is false, then it is you who insults the Prophet with your actions. And if it is true, then it is a perfectly legitimate basis upon which to criticize the religion.

That's not my house!

One day, when I was in kindergarten, we were all asked to draw pictures of our houses. And so we picked up our crayons and got to work. After a while, as my crude representation was beginning to take shape (I took great pains to get the chimney placement just right, struggling with how a vertical chimney could still be perpendicular to a sloped roof), the kid sitting next to me looked over and said indignantly, "That's not my house!"

Okay, so it was a French immersion kindergarten, and maybe the kid was still trying to sort out how pronouns worked, and thought the assignment for everyone was to draw his house. Kind of a cute mistake in a kindergarten kid, but it's somewhat more frustrating when this kind of subjectivity takes over in adults. Lately I've encountered it in two examples I'd like to discuss.

The first was in the context of a Facebook status thread argument about abortion, in which I reprised a little bit of my argument from this posting. Mainly I wanted to make the point that it may not always be a good thing to view the fetus as a person from the moment of conception, because while that may be a great way to behave as an expectant parent, forming a healthy social bond with the person-to-be, it also can create a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the case of a miscarriage. Miscarriages being rather common, after all, is it really better to think of oneself as the grieving parent of a dead child, or a (temporarily) disappointed would-be parent?

This comment drew considerable ire from one commenter who inferred immediately that I must not know what I'm talking about, or I could never say anything so heartless. Obviously I'd never been through a miscarriage myself. Obviously I wasn't a parent. Well.... as it happens, I have a fifteen year old son whom I love dearly, and my wife and I have been through somewhere between 4 and 6 miscarriages after he was born. (It's hard to know the exact number, because in at least one instance it was never fully established that she was actually pregnant. She sure had all the symptoms, but it's uncertain if anything remotely viable was actually starting to develop in there.)

Now, we were deeply disappointed each time, because we really did want a sibling for our son and another son or daughter for ourselves. We also had started to develop hopes for and bonds with the potentiality that was starting to grow, and it was sad to lose them. But did we feel like parents who had lost an actual child? No, no indeed. Our first pregnancy produced a healthy son, and now that he was born, the disappointment of losing a pregnancy was utterly inconsequential compared to the absolute horror with which we thought of losing him. We are the proud parents of a wonderful son; we are not at all the grieving parents of 4-6 dead children and one survivor.

My point here is not the commenter on that thread was wrong to think of a fetus as a person. I don't think she is wrong to think that way, or at least, not very  wrong; on a personal level I think it's quite desirable for individuals to bond with their unborn children that way because it is a part of good parenting. But I think she was wrong to think everyone must think that way, and to assume that her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage was privileged over any other experience that doesn't mesh with it. We are not wrong to be merely disappointed by miscarriage, either. The error she made, and the error I'm musing about in this post, is in thinking that her experience was the experience. Just as my kindergarten classmate mistook his house for the house we were all supposed to draw.

The other example that's been weighing on my mind lately is that of a frequent anonymous commenter to this very blog. He or she regularly exhorts me to accept a particular religious view, assuring me that if I just ask God to reveal Himself to me, I'll come to know Him and cease with all these silly doubts and philosophizing. Now, I don't doubt that I'll feel that way if I just swallow the blue pill (or is it the red one), that I'll be thoroughly and comfortably convinced of my place in the universe and my relation to the divine. But I can't get past the concern that feeling that way won't make it true.

Now, looking at it from the perspective of the commenter, I can certainly see his or her subjective position. I know that believing one has a personal knowledge of the divine feels exactly like knowing, and more, it feels like a private kind of knowing that no one else can truly understand if they don't feel it too. I understand how privileged that sense of knowledge can feel. I feel it too, but I recognize that it really only applies to things that I, by definition, must know, such as how I feel, how I perceive something, how sincerely I am open to God's revealing Himself to me. I know these things better than anyone else can, but I recognize that my subjective privilege doesn't go beyond the borders of my skull. It's not for me to know, better than you do, how you relate to God, whether or not you love your children, what your house looks like.

What I want to assert to my commenter here is that it's not for you to know, better than I do, how I relate to God, how much I love my son, or whether or not I'm drawing an accurate picture of my own house. It's not supposed to be your house.

Making Sense of the First Three Commandments

     When I was in the fifth grade, the Gideons came to my school and handed out New Testaments. I still have mine, a tiny red volume with a the Ten Commandments prominently laid out near the beginning. It was reading the third, in particular, that planted a seed of doubt in my young mind. After, all, the commandments about killing and stealing, well, those were pretty straightforward unassailable moral doctrines. I wasn't entirely sure about all of the others; I didn't understand why God would care which day of the week we took off, and as a fifth-grader I simply figured I'd defer questions on the morality of adultery until I knew what it was.
     But the second and third commandments troubled me. For one thing, "graven images" couldn't possibly mean any likeness at all, as the King James version seemed to say. Not only was I raised in an artistic household (although, to be fair, my father's paintings are kind of abstract), but the church had stained glass windows depicting apostles and saints, and there were mosaics and statues all over the place. If the people whose job it was to preach this stuff thought it was okay to make likenesses of these things, then there must be some special meaning to the word "graven" I didn't understand yet.
     The third one is what really got me angry, because unlike the "graven images" thing, everyone around me seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what it meant. It was even explained to me thusly: Don't use the name of God in a disrespectful manner. And I'd seen people scolded for saying things like "God damn it!" or "Jesus CHRIST!" as an expletive.

     Okay, I'll accept that this is a rude thing to do, I thought. But come on. Commandment #6 is "Thou shalt not kill." The ten commandments are supposed to be the ten biggies, right, the really serious important rules? How does using a mere word come anywhere close to making the list, much less coming well before murder as a no-no? I couldn't imagine that God would be so petty, so vain as to be offended by such an ordinary and commonplace utterance, much less condemn someone to eternal damnation for what he might have said after hitting his thumb with a hammer.

     Thus the seeds of doubt were planted, and eventually I found myself simply abandoning any assumption that the authors of the Bible had any more clue what they were talking about than any other mortal of the time.

     Oddly enough, it was only after becoming a de facto atheist that I began to appreciate a subtler and more important interpretation of the commandments that troubled me so, the first three. In fact, I now believe they are the three most important, for believer and non-believer alike, because they are aimed at fostering a proper sense of humility and piety (and yes, I think an atheist can be pious).

     Let's look at the first. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Trivially, this is no problem for the atheist to obey, because atheists have no gods at all. But more seriously, notice that it doesn't say "Thou shalt place me before other gods." It just says no other gods before God. God is frequently kind of evasive about putting into words exactly what or who He is; "I am that I am" is kind of vague. And yet, even as an atheist, perhaps even because I am an atheist, I'd insist that there is some kind of absolute, objective reality about the universe, something which for lack of a better term I'd be willing to name "God" simply because it's supreme and not subject to anything else. Or call it "Truth", if "God" is too laden with smiting and silliness. And if we put all the mythological baggage of "God" aside, then it turns out that the commandment to have no other gods before Truth becomes one that preaches a genuine piety.

     The second commandment, in my little Gideon New Testament, was explained to me as meaning not that one should never draw a picture of a flower, but that one should never make artifacts into idols. The paradigm case was right there in Exodus, where some of the Israelites made a golden calf and started worshipping it. Now, this is in a sense a violation of the first commandment, since worshipping an artifact is to have another god before God, but it's an especially tricky case, because it's so much easier to think that by genuflecting before a depiction of something, you're worshipping the thing it depicts and not the mere artifact. Yet the God of the Israelites, like the abstract Truth I mentioned in the paragraph above, is not a physical thing, and cannot be depicted at all. So it does make some sense to make it a separate commandment, which I'll restate as follows: "Never mistake a depiction of the Truth for the Truth itself." Or, to use my favourite Zen saying, "Words are a finger pointing at the moon: look at the moon, not the finger."

     Finally, the third commandment deals with a closely related impiety. It has nothing to do with speaking disrespectfully about the Big Guy, but with having the vanity to think you speak for Him. The commandments doesn't say "Thou shalt not speak the Lord's name in vain"; it says "take". What can it mean to take anyone's name, but to assume to act as an agent for them in some way? And is that not an extremely vain thing to assume, especially if it's God you claim to be speaking for?  The vitally important point here is that you do not get to speak for God, no matter what you think it is you're saying. Everything you think you know is just that: what you think you know. None of it has any divine authority, and every thing you ever say about God (especially, but anything else for that matter) should always be attended by the tacit qualifier "I think that..." or "I believe...."   You don't get to say "God hates fags"; you get to say that you believe God hates fags. You don't get to blame anything you say or think or do on the vain pretence that God told you to. For, as the second half of the commandment goes, "the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain."
     That's significant, I think. None of the other commandments tack that on, that the Lord won't hold you guiltless if you steal or murder or covet. It's only taking the Lord's name in vain that gets this addendum, and I think it's because the thing that makes taking His name in vain so bad is that it makes you think you're guiltless, that you're playing it safe and just doing what God says. That's kind of the whole point of taking His name; you think you're just following orders.
     Remember Harold Camping, who predicted the world would end last year? I happened to download his PDF explaining his reasoning, which was subtitled "ANOTHER INFALLIBLE PROOF THAT GOD GIVES THAT ASSURES THE RAPTURE WILL OCCUR MAY 21, 2011".  It would have been fine for him to say, "I'm convinced the Rapture will occur, and here are my reasons," but no, he said it was GOD'S infallible proof. What vanity! What arrogance! What a grave intellectual sin, regardless of whether or not you believe there even is a God. 

     You don't need to believe God exists to see this is a sin. But you kind of need to believe God exists to be capable of committing it.

An Infallible Proof of My Fallibility

     I tend to follow Rene Descartes' skepticism. If you've even heard of Descartes, you're probably familiar with his famous "Cogito, ergo sum," usually translated as "I think, therefore I am." There was very little Descartes felt we could know with certainty, since all of our sensory experience could be an illusion, but he could infer from the mere fact that he was questioning that, at the very least, the questioner must exist.

     I've come up with a similar proof of something Descartes took for granted: the capacity to be mistaken. The proof goes something like this:

    Premise 1: Anyone who believes something to be true that is in fact false is fallible.
    Premise 2: I believe I am fallible.
    I am either fallible or infallible.
    If I am fallible, then my belief in Premise 2 is correct.
    If I am infallible, then by believing myself to be fallible I believe something false, and am therefore by Premise 1 fallible.
    I therefore must be fallible.

     (Of course, this only proves my fallibility if Premise 2 is true. If you happen to believe you are infallible, well, you are probably mistaken about that, but this proof cannot prove it to you.)

     Now, this seems like a trivial and obvious thing to prove. Of course I can be mistaken. Why would I even entertain the possibility that I might not be? Most of us, if we think about it at all, take our fallibility for granted and then promptly forget about it, adopting beliefs with unwarranted confidence at the drop of a hat. But we sometimes forget that absolutely any idea or thought we entertain, regardless of its original source, remains subject to our own fallibility.

     I mention this because it comes up a lot in the religious context, particularly with the fundamentalist crowd. Fundamentalists and scriptural literalists seem to feel that their own fallibility doesn't need to apply, since it's not their ideas but the literal text of the Bible, the very Word of God, which is the belief in question. In a way, it's an attempt to abrogate cognitive responsibility: "Hey, don't blame me! It's God's truth, not mine! I'm just following orders!" Yet there really is no way to escape the fact that whatever you believe, even if it happens to be true, is written on the flawed paper of your own brain; your knowledge and beliefs are tainted with your fallibility; it's only as reliable as you are.

     This is one of the objections I raise when people try to convert me to their fundamentalist religion. They ask me to accept a set of propositions with a level of certainty that my fallible human brain simply cannot support: I can be wrong, and the thing about being wrong is it feels exactly like being right. I don't care how strongly, how intensely, how confidently I may believe something; the magnitude of my fervour has little bearing on my likelihood of being correct. And so, indelibly tainted with this doubt in my ability to know something with certainty, I simply cannot embrace a set of beliefs which promise to make everything make sense if only I believe them.

     Now, there's an interesting argument that came up in some of these comment threads. If God is truly omnipotent, could He not imbue me with certainty about some truth or other? Well, an omnipotent God by definition could do that, I suppose. And being fallible, of course, I'm in no position to state with complete confidence that I could never be certain of any divinely revealed knowledge. Maybe I could. But it seems to me evident that whatever such a God could do, He hasn't. I remain uncertain about pretty much everything. And more, since I grasp this notion of fallibility and how being wrong feels subjectively just like being right, there seems to be no way for a True Believer to convince me that his knowledge of God's reality is somehow privileged and Really, Truly, Knowledge, and not just another of the countless mistaken beliefs we humans flock to. Sure, they feel like you know, but why should I trust the magnitude of their fervour, when I don't even trust my own?
     They tell me, just believe and I'll see. Okay, I believe that much is true; if I believe the way they do, well, yeah, I'll believe the way they do. Big deal. But then both of us might be believing something false, and they can offer no assurance against that, other than simply reaffirming that I'll "know" (read: strongly believe) we're both right.

     As far as I can tell, the problem is logically insurmountable. And sure, God might have the power to help me overcome it, I'll grant that. But so might Flying Spaghetti Monster. Indeed, any belief that God or FSM or my Lucky Astrology Mood Watch can give certain knowledge can have the same effect. In short, all I have to do to overcome the proof of my fallibility is to deny Premise 2: stop believing I am fallible.

     That's really what they're asking me to do, when you get right down to it. Buy into a belief that asserts my own infallibility with respect to some privileged set of beliefs, to assert that I cannot be wrong about such things. And I'm just not prepared to do that. Oddly enough, I feel it would be terribly impious of me; God (if He exists) gets to know things with certainty, but that's not for us to pretend to.

I don't believe in ghosts...

When people learn I'm a skeptic about things like ghosts and such, they'll sometimes relate to me some horrifically spooky experience they had, and then challenge me with "How do you explain THAT?" as if something supernatural is the only plausible explanation. Well, I can't always, but then, I rarely have enough information about the anecdotal situation to make sense of it, especially since it's been retold to me from the perspective of someone who has already chosen to see it in supernatural terms. So I sometimes respond with the following experience of my own, which took place a few years ago.

It’s never so quiet as right after a heavy fall of fluffy snow. I had just been visiting my parents one dark evening, and was walking out to my car, aware of the unnatural absence of the usual background noise of even this quiet residential neighbourhood, and listening intently to the only sound, the squeaky crunch of my shoes in the snow.

They say the ear can play tricks on you in such silence, so I didn’t quite know what to make of it when I heard my wife’s voice, faintly calling my name, as if from far away. I stopped dead in my tracks for a moment, then shook my head and continued. No, I knew my wife was at home and well out of earshot. But then I thought I heard it again.

I stopped and listened. Could I really have heard my wife’s voice? No. Of course not. The silence was messing with my imagination. After a few more long seconds of silence, I continued, a little faster, towards my car, when suddenly I heard my son’s voice, calling “Daaaaad!”

At that I froze. Something about being a parent makes one acutely sensitive to the voice of one’s own child. It’s absolutely unmistakable, and that was no mere trick of the imagination. My son was definitely calling for me.  I hurried to the car, started it up and drove out onto the main street, resisting the urge to go too fast.

Now, I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in ghosts or premonitions or anything of the sort. Yet it was difficult to avoid thinking in such terms. I tried to convince myself that I had not heard both my wife and son calling for me in the impossible silence, but it had been just too vivid to deny. I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread for what I might find when I arrived home.

Anxiously I pulled the car into the garage, hit the remote button to close the garage door behind me, and hastened to the house. Twenty paces from the back door, my cell phone rang in my breast pocket.

My cell phone. I stopped again, for just as long as it took to breathe a sigh of relief. As I mounted the steps of the back porch, my wife opened the door with a smug grin and the handset, my giggling son next to her. Somehow, while pulling on my winter parka, I had bumped against the speed dial button for our house, and not heard her “Hello?” over my crunching footsteps. So I HAD heard their voices calling, but in my early days of cell phone ownership, I was not yet in the habit of knowing I had it with me.

I made sure my next one was a flip phone.

Evolution is Not Your Friend

In my last post, I mentioned a class of objections to the theory of evolution which do not betray gross misunderstandings of the theory. That is, they acknowledge that while evolutionary theory might have objective scientific merit, it leads to implications about the nature or reality that are intuitively, aesthetically or morally objectionable. These objections take a variety of forms.

For example, some find the Hobbesian view of our nature, red in tooth and claw, particularly depressing. The idea that all living things, including us, are merely the temporary survivors of a brutal struggle of each against every other is not a very positive one for those of us who believe deeply in the values of love, tolerance and cooperation. Indeed, many evolutionary biologists themselves going all the way back to Peter Kropotkin (who was 17 years old when Darwin published On the Origin of Species) have emphasized the role of cooperation and mutual aid, rather than competition and conflict, as an important part of the struggle for survival. Yet while evolution can and has produced altruism and human instincts for morality, it still seems unsatisfying somehow to see these things as ultimately rooted in the self-interest of the genes that produce them. We want to feel that noble self-sacrifice really is noble self-sacrifice, not merely some roundabout way of ensuring one's own survival, or worse, a mistake of misfiring instincts.

As unhappy as that sounds, it doesn't really bother me that much. Regardless of how we happened to end up with our imperfect instincts for morality and justice, we have them and they have provoked the philosophers among us to contemplate the logic of it, using the capacity for generalized intelligence we evolved for other purposes to pursue problems that our ancestral environment never "intended" for us. And personally, I am largely persuaded by the efforts of Kant and Mill that there really is an inherent logic "out there" to morality as distinct from the dictates of natural selection. That we got here by means of "survival of the fittest" in no way means that we must adopt that as our moral compass.

Nor am I particularly upset with the absence of a divinely ordained purpose for our existence offered by evolution. There are people who say that the reason they believe in a Creator is that they feel there must be a purpose, some reason we're here, and that we're not just some accident of no importance in the grand scheme of things. I suppose there are two reasons why this objection doesn't really resonate with me: One, I've never really felt the need for authoritative answers from above. Even as a very young child, I frequently doubted the pronouncements of my parents and teachers, and I've never been able to overcome the epistemological hurdle of some mortal human claiming to speak for God; just because they say God wants me to do this or that doesn't mean that's really what God wants. But two: I've never really understood why it would be such a terrible thing if there were no purpose. We exist, and most of us feel a sense of some kind of purpose, whether it's real or not; why do we need it to be on some absolutely solid foundation before we invest ourselves into it? Isn't our own sense of purpose enough, without having to insist that it be dictated by God to have any real meaning?

No, the implication of evolutionary theory I find more dismal is this: we aren't built to be happy, and to some extent we may actually be built to be unhappy. Think about it: our emotional and intellectual capacities were selected for by evolution because they happened to make it likelier that we'd have offspring who would share these capacities. The things that bring us pleasure and fulfilment are not there for our benefit, but rather simply because they tend to motivate us in certain reproductively advantageous directions. Nature doesn't give a damn that we're happy, and in fact it's not really in our genes' interests for us to be too happy or fulfilled, because they we're likelier to slack off in our gene-propagation activities; it's desire that drives us to do stuff, not satisfaction of those desires.

In our ancestral environment, our desires were rarely if ever entirely fulfilled. One of the reasons we love sweet or rich and fatty foods is to encourage us to stock up on them on those infrequent occasions they became available, such as when fruit comes into season, or we're lucky enough to be able to kill some tasty animal. Most of the time we subsisted on vegetables, and so we tend to view leafy green stuff as something to eat if you're really hungry and there's nothing better available. But today, of course, we have virtually unlimited access to sweets and meats, and we have no built-in instinct to regulate how much of it we eat, because we never needed such an instinct in the nearly constant scarcity of our evolutionary past. Our appetites evolved to make us crave things, and never truly be satisfied. There are very good evolutionary reasons for this, but that doesn't make it any easier to resist overindulging in unhealthy diets.

And the same is true of most of our other biologically determined appetites and instincts. It's not enough that we be well-fed and healthy; we also have evolved as a complex social creature for whom status in the group is a key to reproductive success, so we crave being demonstrably better off than our neighbours, or at the very least not worse off. And this is a game that can never be won for most people, since for anyone to win means for everyone else to lose, to some extent.

So that's what I mean when I say we weren't built to be happy. Not just that it's unlikely to be able to attain happiness, but that it may actually be fundamentally built into our very makeup that we should always be unsatisfied. And so I am sympathetic to those who find the implications of Darwin's theory discouraging, even to the point of wanting to reject it.

Yet in my more cheerful moments, I find reason for optimism. Natural selection may have built us to be chronically dissatisfied, but at the same time, the products of human ingenuity are endlessly surprising. We have figured out ways to satiate ourselves with candy and pork chops. Our technology allows us to communicate with each other instantaneously from almost anywhere on the planet. We have devised ways to organize ourselves and relate to each other that our ancestors never could have imagined. And just as we worked out how to fly despite our lack of wings, we may yet figure out how to maximize human happiness in spite of our Darwinian legacy. And even the mere idea that such a thing could be possible should provide all the purpose anyone could need, divinely ordained or not.

Why Creationist Institutes Shouldn't Be Accredited to Grant Degrees in Science

A friend's Facebook status called my attention to a complaint about religious discrimination in that the Institution for Creation Research is being denied accreditation to give degrees in biology. I started to compose a reply to post in the comment thread there, but decided to write an essay here instead. But I'm going to start out by talking about a very important concept in physics: energy.

Energy's a pretty strange concept, when you think about it, and it doesn't help that the word is misused in so many ways. To a science geek like me, energy is measured in joules, kilowatt-hours or electron volts, so I bristle when someone starts explaining acupuncture and translates the word chi as "energy".

But even a simple, concrete unit like a joule is surprisingly abstract. It's not exactly an obvious quantity, like mass or distance or time. Nor is it directly observable; all our experiences of energy are inferred from our observations mediated by matter in some way. Energy is entirely a derived quantity, and the joule is a derived unit, defined as a kilogram meter squared per second squared. (You can get this by noting Einstein's famous formula, E=mc^2: mass times a squared velocity). We talk about potential energy, kinetic energy, thermal energy, energy stored in chemical bonds or atomic forces, the energy of photons, but in all cases we calculate the quantity through indirect means.

So ultimately, energy is an entirely theoretical quantity, never directly observed but so completely pervasive in everything we do that no one would dream to deny its existence. Physics just wouldn't make any sense at all if we didn't postulate this mysterious energy stuff. In fact, this theoretical quantity is so deeply established in our understanding of the world around us that most of us don't even realize that it's really a completely theoretical concept. Certainly no one would seriously say that energy is unscientific because no one's every actually seen the stuff, and anyone who did say that just doesn't understand what "scientific" means. And it may well be that energy doesn't exist, and our current physical theories are just a happy accident that happen to give good results, and a better, more parsimonious theory will come along some day that gives better predictions with fewer postulates, but anyone who did make the radical claim that modern physics is wrong because there's no such thing as energy would quite rightly be discounted as someone who just didn't understand physics. Unless she could provide that better, more parsimonious theory, which would be a staggeringly impressive accomplishment.

Now, the whole point of accreditation for academic institutions is to try to provide some assurance that a person who gets a degree in physics actually understands something about physics. That generally requires that the faculty providing the instruction should know what they're talking about, and if your faculty is trying to make a go of it without reference to energy, they may be teaching something but it probably isn't physics, and therefore should not be accredited to give out degrees in physics. (If they do have that more parsimonious theory, then they should not only be accredited but awarded Nobel prizes at the very least.)

It's important to note that this isn't strictly speaking about belief, but understanding. You don't need to believe in quantum mechanics (Einstein certainly didn't) or relativity to be a physicist, but you should at least understand the theories well enough to be able to provide legitimate criticisms, or to admit that your objections to it are basically intuitive, aesthetic, moral or otherwise unscientific (as with Einstein's famous statement about God not playing dice with the universe.) If you criticize the theory based on a clear misunderstanding of it, though, you call your expertise into question. Just as someone who claims to be a physicist yet denies the existence of energy is probably just profoundly ignorant of physics.

Which brings us at last to evolution. Like energy, large scale evolution has never been directly observed (though unlike energy, small-scale evolution is observed all the time, from antibiotic-resistant infections to African cichlid speciation). And I do not exaggerate to say that just as energy is to physics, evolution is absolutely crucial to modern biology, as evolutionary theory provides a cognitive framework that gives order to and makes sense of all of the observed data so far.

Again, it's not about belief. You don't have to believe in evolution to call yourself a biologist, but if you clearly don't understand the theory, you have no right to be recognized as an expert. And this may sound unnecessarily harsh, but every single creationist criticism of evolutionary theory I've ever heard (with one exception that I'll get to in a moment) has been based on a profound (if in some cases subtle) misunderstanding of the theory. In other words, creationists who use these arguments demonstrate that they literally do not know what they're talking about. And that means they are not in any way qualified to be hold degrees in biology, much less to be accredited to grant them.

I mentioned there was one exception. The only criticism of evolution I've ever encountered that didn't betray a grave misunderstanding of the theory goes something like this: "It may well be that the theory of evolution is the best one available so far to explain all the observed data, but it still feels wrong to me because it conflicts with my deeply held beliefs or intuitions that are not themselves scientific." That's the same form, essentially, as Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics; it just felt wrong to him that random chance could play so fundamental a role in the basic structure of the universe, notwithstanding that there was no solid scientific basis upon which to object to the theory. Likewise, one might feel intuitively that evolution is wrong because it's aesthetically unsatisfying, or one might believe it is false because one is committed to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, or that it has destructive moral implications, but none of these are valid scientific objections, and none of them stand in the way of actually understanding the theory even if one happens to believe it is wrong.

Nor do any of these objections stand in the way of accreditation. There are probably lots of biologists who feel intuitively uneasy about some of the implications of evolutionary theory (and I'm working on a post about one of these implications I may get around to finishing in a few days), but they understand and apply the theory, and teach it, and they know what they're talking about. There are undoubtedly physicists who are somehow, deep down, convinced that relativity or quantum mechanics or both just somehow must be wrong, but they know what they're talking about. There may even be physicists who doubt the existence of energy, but they still have to know what they're talking about.

The reason creationist organizations like ICR don't get accredited to grant degrees in biology is not that they're uncomfortable with evolution. It's simply that when it comes to biology, they don't know what they're talking about.

An Invitation to Convert Me (via the comments thread)

This isn't the kind of post I'd normally make. What I'm trying to do, normally, is to share ideas I find interesting or puzzling, and perhaps provoke some discussion of them in the comments thread so as to get new and better insights. I may illustrate some of these ideas with personal anecdotes, or give a bit of personal background as to how I came to be thinking of them, but the posts themselves are not intended to be about me. They're about the ideas.

Yet I have noticed, particularly when I post about religious ideas, that some commenters feel the need to try to convert me to their religion. In the past I've had long religious discussions in email as a result of articles on my old web page, also aimed at convincing me to adopt this or that set of beliefs. I've also enjoyed my discussions with the Jehovah's Witnesses and other proselytizers who come to me door on occasion.

I do enjoy such discussions, but they're not always directly appropriate to the topic at hand. While it might well be true that if I believed this or that claim about the Gospels, I'd no longer care about the question posed in a blog post, the fact is that I am at the moment interested in the question, and so might any reader who took the time to read the original post.

So the purpose of this blog posting is to provide an appropriate comment thread in which to persuade me that I should accept the Bible as the literal Word of God, and of whatever it is that you might think follows from that claim. I don't mean to imply that people posting in this thread are unwelcome to contribute in other comment threads as well, but I do request that comments be related directly to the subject of the posting that starts the thread.

I suppose I should begin by giving my reasons for not currently accepting the Bible as the literal word of God. For one, there's a basic epistemic hurdle: the only basis I've seen for taking it as God's Word is that, well, other people have earnestly said it is, and I while I tend to trust people as being generally honest, I don't trust them never to be mistaken. True, there are some passages in the Scriptures that make some claims to divine authority, but those also suffer from a similar problem: just because someone claims to be speaking the Word of God doesn't mean he is. He could be lying, or sincere but deluded.

But another reason is that, in my reading of the Bible so far, most of the books do not claim to be divinely authoritative, and in many cases identify themselves as the works of identifiable mortal humans. Indeed, pretty much all of the New Testament consists of epistles from this or that disciple (Paul being the most voluminous) to various recipients, preaching about God but for the most part not claiming to be God. The Gospels, too, are presented as the testimonies of authors known as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and thus presumably represent the differing perspectives of individual humans on the events described within. And in the Old Testament, though tradition states that Moses himself wrote the Pentateuch, that seems unlikely, given that he dies before the end of Exodus, and no explanation is given as to how he'd be a reliable authority on the events of Genesis. (One might assume God told him, but that can only work to sustain the premise that the Bible is God's word; it cannot count as evidence for the premise.) Plus, having just finished Psalms and now slogging my way through Proverbs, I can't help but see a lot of this stuff as historical text written by people with political agendas (Solomon proposing to cut the baby in half as a veiled threat to tear apart the kingdom in a civil war, for example) and self-indulgent ego-fests like Mao's Little Red Book. (Seriously, Psalms seems like a collection of King David's Greatest Hits (and some not-so-great which no one would dare to call less than great), while Proverbs reads like Solomon sat down and scribbled out a couple of hundred, perhaps planning on selecting just the best for a small collection of pithy sayings, and some toadying yes-man of an editor told him, "Sire, they're ALL so good! I couldn't bear to cut a single one!" Even though an awful lot look like edits and re-edits of the same trite observation.)

So in other words, it really doesn't read like God wrote it. Not that I have any idea how God writes (though I'd kind of expect high standards), but I don't see anything about the style, structure or organization that sets the book apart from any other human creation. In short, it looks to me like exactly what you'd expect from a collection of ancient myths, historical/political texts (and a few straight attempts at narrative fiction, poetry and philosophy, like Job, Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon), combined with the newer quasi-historical accounts and evangelical letters of the New Testament, all arbitrarily selected by the Council of Nicea in accordance with the dominant religious agenda of the time. I see no compelling reason to see it as anything other than a human text, about God, perhaps, but not by God except in the same empty sense that everything else is as well.

That's how I see it, anyway. I hereby cordially invite any and all of you use the comments thread to persuade me why I should (or shouldn't) adopt a different view of the Bible.

A Problem with "Because God Says So!" as a Basis for Morality

     Atheism is often criticized by Christians on the grounds that it does not provide any basis for morality. To these Christians, morality is a matter of following God's commands, and if there's no God to give this guidance, to establish values, then how can there by any morality?
     In return, atheists often pointed out that obeying the literal commands of God (assuming that the literal commands of God are in fact recorded in the Bible) leads to some pretty horrific results, particularly if you look at the Old Testament. Are we really expected to stone adulterers to death? How can that possibly be a moral thing to do?
     One answer I've often heard is that most of that Old Testament stuff no longer applies. Most recently, a Christian friend of mind argued that Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments (including the commandment to stone adulterers, but also the many kosher rules still observed by Jews today), and so they no longer need to be followed.
     Okay, so that gets us off the hook for having to follow those old rules, and maybe the only obligations remaining are the ones that we all can feel nice and warm about, the ones that make moral sense to us today because they're rooted in the general principle, "love thy neighbour". And that's how I used to feel about the argument, until just after my friend brought it to my attention again, when it suddenly occurred to me that this doctrine creates greater problems than it solves.
     Consider what it means for people living before Jesus came along to fulfil the commandments. It means that in those days, God wanted us to stone adulterers, and consequently that it was not just culturally acceptable, but morally right to do so! Something which, today, we consider morally outrageous and barbaric -- partially burying a living human being and then throwing rocks at the exposed parts until the person dies -- was good and proper at some time in the past. The very nature of morality has apparently changed.
     I find this argument rather shocking, especially coming from a tradition that condemns moral relativism. I, too, have little patience with people who look at the various cultural practices going on today in other parts of the world, such as female genital mutilation and, yes, stoning adulterers to death, and say we can't judge it to be wrong because it's a different culture. Wrong is wrong, and just because something is culturally accepted somewhere doesn't make it right. I rather think it would go without saying that this is true across time as well as across space; if it's wrong to stone adulterers today, then it was wrong yesterday and wrong three thousand years ago. Conversely, if it was right three thousand years ago, it should be right today.
     It also seems to me to be far more damaging to the idea of biblical literalism than even young-earth creationism. After all, there is something to the creationist rebuttal to scientific claims about origins: "Were you there? Did you see any of this?" No, of course, I wasn't there, and didn't see what happened with my own eyes, and it is conceivable that things unfolded differently from what modern science has inferred from the evidence. But claims about moral principles are different. I may not know the circumstances of any particular act of ancient adultery, but don't need to have lived 3000 years ago to say with great confidence that it would generally be wrong to stone someone to death for adultery. Wrong is wrong, and fundamental moral principles do not change over time, although our understanding of them certainly does evolve. Slavery was always wrong; it just took us a while collectively to recognize that.
     I don't see a way out here for the theory that God's commandments are definitive of morality, or at least not one that also preserves the biblical literalism so many Christians insist upon (and which I've criticized as idolatrous (typo corrected Feb 13, 2012: I originally wrote "adulterous" by mistake) in an earlier post. You could say that the fundamental principles of morality are given by God, but encoded into the fabric of reality like the laws of physics or mathematics, rather than accurately described in the Bible, and that ethical philosophers like Kant, Mill, Jesus, Lao Tzu and Confucius have been adding to our understanding over time. Or you could just bite the bullet and insist that yes, the principles of morality really did change drastically when Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments, in which case it becomes rather puzzling to consider how Confucius came up with his version of the Golden Rule back in the days when the Golden rule couldn't possibly have applied because it really was morally right to stone people to death, to slaughter the Canaanites, and so on.

Evolution of the Soul

      Why is it that almost every human culture has some notion of a soul? I don't necessarily mean the idea of an immortal soul that persists after death, but some kind of spirit or essence of self which is distinct from the body. There must be some reason for the near ubiquity of such a concept, and I am inclined to suspect an evolutionary survival benefit.

     Years ago, when I was at graduate school, a confluence of three experiences got me to thinking about this. The most significant was the death of my grandfather. When my wife and I arrived at the airport and met my sisters and mother, they recounted having gone to view the body earlier that day, and I was struck by how each of them remarked that it wasn't really him. That is, it was clearly his body, but he wasn't there.

      Within a few weeks of this, I was driving to pick up my wife after her night shift at work at the hospital, when I spotted three pigeons in the road in front of me, two of them dead. Fortunately, at 5 in the morning, there was virtually no traffic, so I slowed down to give the one live pigeon the opportunity to get out of the way. It seemed reluctant to leave its companions, however, and took a few moments to decide. At last it hopped up onto the curb, and I was able to proceed, my tires missing the fallen fowl by a healthy margin.
      Almost the next evening, I recall watching a nature documentary on TV in which a gnu had just delivered a stillborn calf, attracting the attention of some hyenas. The mother gnu valiantly protected her calf through the whole night, while the hyenas waited with evident patience. At last, the mother gave up and left, and the hyenas ate.

     The pigeon and the gnu I thought about for some time after that. It was kind of touching how the pigeon didn't want to abandon its friends, and the gnu's predicament was absolutely heartbreaking. Although I was not a parent yet myself, I could certainly identify with her, and could scarcely imagine a circumstance in which I would abandon my own child to hyenas.

     And that's kind of when it struck me, reflecting on my grandfather's funeral and the viewing of the body. He wasn't there, in his body. There was no imaginable circumstance in which we would willingly cremate or bury my grandfather, but this was just a lifeless body, not him.

     And so I suspect that we (and probably other species) have evolved a tendency to combine a number of sensory factors (things like temperature, movement, breathing, a pulse, and the like) into a kind of holistic sense of the presence or even identity of a person, distinct from the body itself. Something that would allow us to abandon our dead to the hyenas, without seriously compromising our powerful instinct to protect our living kin. We would not abandon our kin just because they had been injured or lost some simple tangible property, like a pulse; we'd need to be able to believe that they no longer inhabited the body, that they were no longer the person we cared about. Hence, something like a soul, a spirit, an intangible essence that we nonetheless feel we sense through all the tangible vital signs.

     This doesn't mean we have a soul, of course. (Nor does it necessarily mean we don't.) It's simply an account of why all human cultures would have some kind of related concept, and incidentally a response to the common argument that we must have souls because every human culture believes in them independently.

Living with Uncertainty: Knowing versus Understanding

     My last post, in which I argue against taking religious scriptures as ultimately authoritative, has got me to thinking about why some people cling so tenaciously to the Bible, and I think it has to do with the grave discomfort some people have about uncertainty. The other thing that's got me thinking along these lines, of course, is my chemotherapy: I've just (as of this writing) begun round 11 of a 12-round regimen, and I'm struggling with trying to decide whether or not to go ahead with round 12. Struggling, because I have virtually no useful data upon which to base my decision.

     A little bit of medical background. After my surgery (they took a section of my colon out, which contained a golf-ball-sized tumor), I was told that with no further action, there was a 50% chance that in five years I'd be cancer free, but with the best chemo regimen they had, it would be 70%. Now, my gut feeling (with admittedly less gut than before) is that I'm already on a favourable region of that bell curve; I figure the odds of them having got out all the cancer were better than 50%. Still, even if there's only a 30% chance I have a couple of treasonous lymph nodes plotting my demise, I figured it was worth going ahead to improve my odds. 

      I was aware, of course, that it's ONLY a matter of improving my odds, not a guarantee. I'm quite familiar with uncertainty, and as a philosopher quite comfortable with it, for the most part. However, I really do wonder if it's worth having all 12 rounds of the therapy. If I've already had ten, what's the marginal benefit of rounds 11 and 12? I know with a high degree of confidence that the side effects will continue to get worse; they've been very consistently cumulative so far, with each round being a bit more unpleasant than the one before it, but I have no idea how important round 12 is to the overall likelihood of success for the treatment. And the doctors can't tell me, either, because there really haven't been any studies on it. (Although talking to my oncologist today, I learned that such a study is underway, and it does seem that more of the benefits of the treatment come from the first six rounds than from the last six. But we just don't know how much.)

     So really, all I have to go on is a bunch of guesswork, possibly tainted by wishful thinking. I just have no idea at all if I should go ahead with round 12 or not, and it's very difficult and very frustrating to make a decision when I have so little data to work with.

     And so I also begin to have some sympathy for those who long for the illusory certainty offered by the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. How much more comfortable to just know something as absolutely true, and not have to worry about being wrong! Especially so when being wrong might have such catastrophic consequences as eternal damnation. 

     But this is wrong on several counts. I'm not going to get into all the evidence that suggests the Bible is a document fallibly written, transcribed, translated,  edited and redacted by ordinary mortal humans. (I don't believe it's impious with respect to God to be doubtful of the fallibility -- and the claims of infallibility -- of one's fellow mortals, even if they are called prophets.) 

     The most crucial way in which it is wrong to cling to certainty via the Bible is the inescapability of human fallibility, which I like to think of as like Original Sin, except that it can't really be washed away. We can be wrong, and it feels exactly like being right. Even if we accept that holy scriptures are divinely authoritative, there's no escaping the weak link: our interpretation thereof. We just cannot know that we've interpreted it correctly, and the fact that so many religious sects actively and passionately disagree over doctrine, each fervently believing they've got it right, shows vividly that we are prone to error even about divinely revealed truth: at least one party must be mistaken. Yet each party is steadfastly convinced it's the other.

     One of the most important virtues, perhaps the most important, is humility, the recognition of one's own fallibility, or to put it another way, the recognition that we are not Gods. The call to Christianity (or Islam, for that matter) is not a call to be comfortable, but a call to struggle valiantly against the adversities of this world, one of which is the overwhelming uncertainty the confronts every thinking being. You can be wrong about everything you believe, and that's a darned scary thought. There is no cheat sheet, no solidly reliable answer key to refer to, no way to be sure of anything. 

     So how do we survive and thrive in this sea of uncertainty? I think the problem is this desire we have for knowledge. I have found it useful to seek understanding instead of knowledge. Knowledge is concerned with an unattainable standard of certainty, while understanding is much more practical. I can understand that, given premises about the definitions of numbers and addition and equality, 2+2=4, without committing myself to the truth of those definitions, or that they necessarily apply to anything in the "real" world. I can understand the world better by adopting the theories of science, without committing myself to the belief that the world isn't just a big virtual reality designed to give the illusion of an ancient, evolved Earth. 

     And so while it is frustrating to have so little data upon which to decide whether or not to continue with my chemotherapy, I am at least free of the worry that I might make the "wrong" decision. I will try to make the best decision I can, based on my understanding of the situation at the time, and if it turns out to have unpleasant consequences, well, too bad. Sometimes even good decisions lead to bad consequence. I have accepted and embraced the inescapable uncertainty of life, and that probabilities are pretty much all we've got. There are no guarantees, and we have to live -- and die -- with that. That's why we need virtues like courage and humility and yes, a certain kind of faith. 

Abraham and Isaac, and a very common form of idolatry.

     I'm going to start this posting with the story of Abraham and Isaac, from the book of Genesis. 

     Abraham was getting on in years, and his wife Sarah was pretty old too. It looked as if they weren't going to be able to have any children, which was a big disappointment. Then the Angel of the Lord told Abraham that he was going to be the father of a great nation, despite his advanced age. Sarah laughed at this, but sure enough, she became pregnant with Isaac.

     Now, Isaac was obviously pretty important to Abraham, and an integral part of God's promise to him. So it was no small request when God asked Abraham to take Isaac up the mountain and sacrifice him.  He obediently took up his knife, and prepared to gut his son right there on the altar. This is taken as a sign of Abraham's great faith in God.

     (Nota bene: Clearly, the Abraham in the story was suffering from some sort of delusional state, possibly paranoid schizophrenia. Hearing voices telling you to kill someone is mental illness, not visitation from God. But in the context of the Genesis narrative, it supposedly was God talking, and I'm going to assume that to be the case for the sake of the theological argument, notwithstanding the more realistic psychiatric interpretation of the event.)

     So let's apply this parable to the modern Christian (or Muslim or Jew, or anyone who takes a book to be divinely authoritative). The Bible (or Koran) represents God's promise to the believer, a divine revelation about the nature of the universe and man's place in it, and how to obtain eternal reward, just as Isaac was the embodiment of God's promise to Abraham. If you believe that the Book was a divine gift to humanity, then you might well treat it as especially precious, just as Abraham must have felt about Isaac.

     Now suppose God appears to you and tells you something that contradicts the Bible. Which do you believe, God or the Bible? 

     Most Christians I ask this question chuckle and say it's a meaningless hypothetical, because God would never contradict Himself. Stop to parse that one out logically: I describe a scenario where God contradicts the Bible, and they respond He'd never contradict Himself. Does that not imply that they assume the Bible = God? 

     When I point that, they usually admit that of course God is not a piece of text, but the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe, which clearly this bound stack of papers on my desk cannot be. But they still insist that since the Bible is the Word of God, and God does not lie, He would never contradict His own word.

     Yet logically, it still reduces to the same thing: they make the Bible text absolute and binding upon what God can and can't do. In other words, although they tried to evade the choice I presented them with (God or the Bible, and the Bible itself says you cannot serve two masters: Matthew 6:24), they've made it: To them, the Bible, and not God, is supreme. 

     That's not what Abraham did. He could have reasoned, "Wait a minute. God promised to make me a great nation, and this is my only son, the son God Himself gave me, the son through which my great nation will come to be. God wouldn't break His promise. Whoever this is asking me to sacrifice Isaac, it can't be God!" But he didn't do that. He took up his knife, and obediently prepared to sacrifice his son. To repudiate God's gift to him.

     You see, Abraham placed his faith in God, not in God's gift to him. He didn't necessarily know how God could keep His promise after Isaac was ashes, but he didn't need to: he trusted that God was God and that meant God could do anything He damn well wanted.

     In the same way, I think Bible-worshippers would do well to take their faith away from the Bible, and place it in God directly. If God wants to contradict the Bible, He certainly can; He's not obliged to conform to any text, especially not one that has been through so many fallible human writers, redactors, translators and interpreters. (And how is worshipping the Bible not a violation of the commandment against graven images, anyway? Why is worshipping a textual depiction okay, but a graphic depiction isn't? Aren't they both the wrong thing to be worshiping?)

     Now, there's a happy ending here, just as there was (sort of) for Abraham and Isaac. If you are truly willing to cast your Bible into the sacrificial flame, to give it up completely and affirm that God and God alone is Supreme, you'll find out that you don't actually need to sacrifice it. You can keep it, and read it, and derive whatever meaning and value you can from it. But it will become a book about God, perhaps a deeply treasured book, but still just a book, and not God. Read it, interpret it, re-interpret it, criticize it, love it, hate it. Just don't worship it.

Pascal's Wager and Chain Letter Superstition

     I have been studying and collecting chain letters for some time, and I've even been developing a sort of Linnean taxonomy of the critters. One thing I've always wondered about is just how many people who forward them actually believe in them, and my informal surveys seem to suggest it's actually relatively few who actually claim any kind of sincere belief. More often than not, people seem to forward them "just in case". That is, they tend to doubt the threats of bad luck for breaking the chain, but they don't want to take any chances.

    The reasoning here is actually the same as that in Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal, who made wonderful contributions to mathematics and probability, is also known for his argument for why one should believe in God. Now, it's not actually a cognitive argument, in the sense that it provides no evidence whatsoever as to whether or not God is likely to exist. Rather, it's an instrumental argument about the respective costs and benefits of belief versus doubt.
     The argument is, of course, mathematical and probabilistic in character. Pascal divides up the possibilities and creates a payoff table, now familiar to students of game theory. There are two variables: Belief/disbelief, and Existence/nonexistence of God. You can either believe or not believe, and in either case you can either be right or wrong (that is, God may exist or not exist).
     If you believe, and God exists, your payoff is going to Heaven when you die, to which we assign an infinite positive payoff value. If you believe, and God does not exist, well, then you die and cease to exist. Payoff is zero, just as it is for the nonbeliever who turns out to be right. But pity the nonbeliever who is wrong, for the payoff is the infinite negative of eternal damnation!
     So, Pascal argues, looking just at the payoff table, the rational choice is to believe, because the worst that can happen is you're wrong and you just die and cease to exist, whereas you have an infinite positive payoff if you happen to be right. Even if it's 99% certain that there is no God, you're still better off believing than not believing, because at worst your payoff will be the same as the non-believer's best possible result.

     What's wrong with this argument? Well, it doesn't actually take into account all of the possible payoffs. How do we know, for example, that God actually will reward people for believing and punish them for doubt? Perhaps after going to such trouble to create a universe in which there was no unambiguous empirical evidence for His existence, He actually wants us to doubt, and so the doubters will be rewarded and the believers punished for their irrational wishful thinking. The thing is, we just don't know the actual payoff table for Pascal's Wager, and so there's no way to conclude that we're actually playing it safe by believing.

     The same applies to superstitious practices like chain letters. People look at the text of the chain, and assume there are only two possibilities: True or Not True. Either it'll give you bad luck if you break the chain, or it won't. Yet no one stops to consider that maybe it's telling the very opposite of the truth. Assuming for the sake of argument that a chain letter can actually influence your luck, perhaps the letter lies about the nature of the influence, and maybe breaking a chain is actually good luck. Maybe passing it along brings bad luck.
     We simply cannot rule out that possibility. What do we really know about crazy magical concepts like luck and how it works? What reason is there to believe that a magic letter has to tell the truth about its effects? Maybe magic works on the Opposite Day concept, where it has to lie to have its effect. There's really no way to know anything about these mystical powers, and pretty much by definition, we're not supposed to. They're maaaagic!


     If you do the math, the infinitely unknowable possibilities are equal on both sides of the equation. You are not playing it any safer by carrying on the chain letter than you are by breaking it. Nor are you actually playing it safer by believing in God, if that's your motive for believing. (Seriously, don't you think an omniscient being will know what you're up to, and see how cynical and self-serving your "belief" is? Is that really what God wants from us? Well, maybe, but it's just as likely it isn't.)

     I've heard people say they'll pray for someone who's sick, and cheerfully remark that while it might not help, it can't hurt. Well, if it can't hurt, then it probably can't help, either, at least not in the way they think. Of course, it's nice to have someone care about you, and to know they're thinking warm thoughts about you, and that's good in itself. But if some mystical or supernatural power is involved, then it's just a mistake to assume that power can only work in the way one chooses to imagine it working; if weird magic stuff is in the cards, all bets are off.

     The lesson here, if there is one, is that we should simply ignore superstitious considerations when we make decisions. Just because a chain letter threatens bad luck if you break it doesn't mean you won't have good luck for breaking the chain. It's okay to wish for things, to pray for things, and so on, but don't get trapped into thinking that wishing or praying by themselves have any kind of causal effect. They might, of course, but if they do, they're just as likely to have the opposite of the desired effect. So just let those unknowables cancel themselves out of both sides of the equation, and decide based on what you do know.

An Atheist of Faith

     It's unfortunate, I think, that we so often use the word "faith" as a synonym for "belief". The two are very different things.  Belief is a matter of taking a position on the truth value of a statement, whereas faith is a matter of acting as if something is true, without necessarily believing that it is.

     In large part, it was law school that brought me to an understanding of faith, as distinct from belief. As they drill into us, "Nobody cares what you think." That's most commonly heard when preparing for a moot, when many students fall into the speech habit of saying, "I think that..." which generally speaking just isn't good rhetorical technique (though in some cases it can be very effective), but in fact it really does go to the core of legal ethics.

     Consider representing a defendant in a criminal case. You might well believe your client to be guilty. Heck, you might believe this so strongly that you'd say you know he's guilty. But nobody cares what you think (or what you think you know); your job is to give your client the best representation possible, to ensure the integrity of the legal process. You need to put aside what you think, and present to the court the best evidence and argument (subject to the proviso that you must do so with scrupulous honesty) for your client's case, and have faith that the judge (and jury, if any) will come to the proper conclusions on their own. 

     Now, you may not actually believe that the prosecutor will present enough evidence to convict your guilty client, and you may not believe that the judge and jury are actually smart enough to reach an appropriate verdict and sentence, but that is not your call to make. You are not the one charged with the responsibility of deciding your client's guilt or innocence, and your own prejudices could easily undermine the whole process if you attempt to preempt the court's judgment with your own. In order for the system to work, you must do your job, and leave it to the prosecutor, the bench and the jury to do theirs. So you must make your arguments with the available evidence as if you believe your client to be innocent, whether you do or not, and as if you believe your counterparts in the process are competent, whether you believe it or not. In short, you must act in good faith, regardless of what you believe.

     Contrast this notion of faith with religion's emphasis on belief. Many religious people go well beyond claiming to believe that God exists; they claim to know so. It is as if the fervency of belief is a measure of piety; the more certain one feels, the fewer doubts one harbours, the greater the devotion. 

     As a philosopher sharing in Descartes' radical skepticism, I find this concern with belief to be baffling. How can we puny, fallible mortal sinners possibly lay any claim to infallible certainty about any fact? It seems to me obvious that we are all capable of error, and indeed all churches seem to try to point that out: there may be a God, but we are not it. So the focus on certainty of belief itself strikes me as fundamentally impious right from the start.

    Yet faith is something else entirely, and does not demand that we overcome our human epistemological limits. All we must do demonstrate faith is to act as if we accept a proposition as true. We are free to doubt that it is true, and indeed I think that people of honest intellect are morally obliged to acknowledge doubts.

    That is why I don't object to describing myself as an atheist of faith, when I bother to describe my (lack of) belief at all. (I have also occasionally referred to myself as a Zen Catholic. A koan: What happens when you give up religion for Lent?) I have infinite faith in God's goodness, and none in His existence. This means that while I don't actually believe God exists, and more frighteningly, while I have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that if He does exist He's not an evil spiteful monster, I simply have to act as if I believe that a truly omniscient and omnibenevolent God will have perfect knowledge of my reasons and motives, and will not condemn me to the unspeakably nasty afterlife many religions threaten sinners and unbelievers with.

     These threats, by the way, lead to a curious paradox: many of those who believe (or who profess to believe) do so in bad faith: they do not trust God to be perfectly just and merciful, and thinking they err on the side of caution (consider Pascal's Wager), they go along with whatever their church, synagogue, temple, mosque or religious leader commands, perhaps expecting the "I was just following orders!" defense to be a complete answer. Me, I doubt, but I do so in good faith and with a clear conscience. At least, as clear as the conscience of one who knows himself to be fallible can be.