God of the Gaps

Professor Winston; I didn’t get the rest of his name. The show was a BBC production, The Story of God: The God of the Gaps. Pr. Winston was looking at the question of god from the viewpoint that he’d (God) been relegated to the gaps in scientific knowledge; which was a curious argument for Winston to take as he is an avowed believer in God. Although perhaps not so strange as he also presented himself as a firm Darwinist and follower of orthodox science; he was no starry-eyed dreamer. Winston has a tooth-brush mustache à la Groucho Marx and shares his Judaism. Other than that he seemed less of a wit and more kind.

Winston’s prime argument, a common one, is that people have two sides—spiritual and rational—and that they serve different human needs. All the while, mind you, demonstrating how the concept of god has withered through the centuries to be left only with this vague spiritualism of which he speaks. All fine and good, but he never got around to defining what this spiritual need is. He finished by pointing out that scientists don’t know what came before the Big Bang and religious folk don’t know what God is like, so they are both founded on uncertainty.

Well, yeah, sort of. No.

For one thing, in the end he compared the two views anyway; he didn’t leave them to their separate fields. He tacitly acknowledged that religion does concern itself with the knowable, not just the imaginary; and that where the two collide, religion disappears. Quite why he wants to hang onto the thread of religion is not examined.

Along the way he visited a statistician, who, in theory, could give a statistical basis as to whether or not God exists; but it turn out, could only give a statistical basis for what one thought about God, not about the likelihood of God itself. This fellow had an algorithm into which he inserted variables of what one thought about likely proofs for a god being correct. Winston, for example, thought that the existence of love counted in favor of the likelihood of their being a god. Winston had a couple assumptions like that; so, according to his beliefs, there was a 96% chance of there being a god. How that was anything other than confirming what he already told us—that he believed in God—was not explained; but it seemed to have been inserted into the film as positive evidence for the likelihood of there being a god. In the category of “Well, we don’t have any stronger evidence, so, we’ll go with the belief algorithm.” Winston believes strongly that there is a god and he’s a reasonable and pleasant enough fellow, so there must be something to it, right? But is that scientific?

If nothing else, it’s a superficial understanding of love. Thinking that love is anything other than an evolutionarily evolved emotion belies either wishful or limited thinking. Winston didn’t explain how attachments formed by other animals are categorically different than human attachments; he simply assumed so. Isn’t that a form of reverse-anthropomorphism, thinking that humans are categorically different from other different animals? Is it logical to think that our increased brain capacity has led to new types of emotions? Is it our intellectual capacity which governs what moves us emotionally; and that animals without our capacity don’t have our emotions, that our emotions evolved out of our intellect? Is it reasonable to base one’s belief in a god on a single emotion?

Winston never examined why he chose love as evidence for God anymore than, say, anger or hunger or frustration. Nor did he explain where love came into the chain of existence and why. Is love here to prove that there’s a god, or is there a practical side to love?

I don’t know; to me it just seems silly. All that time and effort put into making a documentary where in the end a guy shrugs his shoulders and says, “I think there’s a god because I want there to be a god.” I just don’t find that a convincing argument, no matter how nice a guy is that makes it.

How Come It’s So Fucking Hard to Talk to Believers?

Gregory Koukl

If you go to Christian apologetics Websites, you’ll find long, tedious refutations of atheism, just like you’ll find long, tedious anti-Christian screeds on atheist Websites. Because I agree with the atheists, I can’t find much, besides their strident attitude, to disagree with; but when I hit the Christian sites I find I can’t read but a few paragraphs before I’m boiling over at the inaccuracies. And the inaccuracies are most often of the same variety: misstatements of the atheist position. The favorite tactic is to set up a straw dog, knock it down, and congratulate ones self on ones brilliance.

Let me give you this bit of reasoning from Gregory Koukl on the Website Stand to Reason, in an essay called “Evolution Can’t Explain Morality.” He’s explaining what he perceives as the “naturalist” argument for altruistic morality:

“So, in abbreviated form, the reasoning goes like this: I ought to be unselfish because it is better for the group, which is better for the species, which is better for me. So why ought I be unselfish? Because it is better for me. But looking at what is better for me, is selfishness. So all of this so-called description of where morality comes from, gets reduced to this ludicrous statement: I morally ought to be unselfish so that I can be more thoroughly selfish….

“Since morality is prescriptive, not descriptive, and if it is normative…, it talks about how we ought to behave…”

Which is great and nice and tight. Except that the reasoning doesn’t go like that and morality is not prescriptive. Small problems.

Who does Mr. Koukl think prescribes this morality? Isn’t morality more like language: it’s how we do behave, not how we “should” behave? Doesn’t the prescriptive nature of morality come from one person wishing to impose their views on another? It appears as if Mr. Koukl is arguing that because there has to be someone prescribing morality—otherwise we wouldn’t have it—there has to be a god to do the prescribing. If only morality were prescriptive and not a construct of humanity.

But as usual, such apologetics arguments are really admissions that the arguer has no clue what she/he is talking about. They always start with unproven assumptions and carry on from there. That’s the kind of thinking that leads one to think the Ten Commandments are the word of God. No, really, it does.

As to whether or not we should act unselfish, again it’s misstating the situation. It’s not that we should act unselfish, it’s that we do. It’s not that we ought to behave unselfishly, it’s that selfish people tend to not reproduce so well. The species can’t afford to have a slug of selfish people around; it just kills them off early and has them lead miserable, neurotic lives that leave them with weak sperm counts or whatever. In the long run it rewards peaceful cooperative communities, which is why violence has continued to go down in the world for at least 40,000 years: Mother Nature goes on weeding out the violent.

So, all-in-all, we have been unselfish in our lives, beginning with our family and friends and slowly spreading out from there. We’re doing pretty well at not killing our neighbors; and pretty soon we’ll maybe stop killing the folks on the other side of the border, as well. I have hopes. Most everyone wants to reign in corporate power and utilize the resources for the benefit of the entire species. I think we’ll work towards that next. It’s not going to be easy and it will be brutal; but not so bad as we thought and we’ll win. If it’s good for the species, the species will win; and when the species wins, we all win. The species doesn’t care if you’re selfish; it just won’t let you reproduce well. And that’s why the Enlightenment has spread so quickly: people who have slipped the yoke of religious isolationism have done better than those who haven’t: Sweden-Nigeria, for example.

Richard Deem

The second instance comes from a fellow named Richard Deem who runs a Website called, I believe, Evidence for God. You’d think it would be a pretty short site, but he goes on forever. I couldn’t get much past the paragraph quoted below (“Atheists are left with…”), so I wrote him the following:

If you're going to argue against atheism, at least use their real arguments. Don't imagine arguments and then argue against them. The following quote from you is off the charts. It's an incorrect characterization of atheism. No wonder why you strayed. You didn't understand it. No atheist is going to deny the possibility of God, only the probability of God. Big difference. Anything imaginable is possible; not everything that is imagined is probable. God is highly improbable; that's all we're saying. And that's just a statistical fact.

[Richard’s argument.]

“Atheists are left with a dilemma, since their worldview requires that all things that begin to exist must have a cause. So, logic requires the admission that the universe had a cause. Virtually all atheists say that this cause was some natural phenomenon. It is also possible that the cause of the universe was a supernatural intelligence (i.e., God). However, there is no direct observational evidence for either belief. Those who are ‘strong atheists’ (not working out in the gym, but having a belief that no god exists) have just violated one of the main rules of atheism - that all beliefs are based upon observational evidence. So, any atheist who denies the possible existence of God violates his own worldview.”

To Richard’s credit, he responded to my note:

“Johan,

“Please provide the data behind your claim that ‘God is highly improbable.’ Where are your statistics?”

I gave him my statistics. I replied with this:

It's the statistics of fantasy. Any fantasy can be true in some universe, but to rank statistically, you need a body of data. You have to have a sample of at least one. Without a sample, it's in the realm of fantasy. And an unnecessary one, at that. Every religion is a myth system that has nothing to do with observable reality. None of them explain anything. Now, religions do have a lot of functions in society, don't get me wrong, but it's not in the realm of explaining how the universe works. Religions have no idea about that. Myths aren't reality. They're very influential, but they aren't real. So, the chance of any fiction being real approaches zero in this universe and to be statistically probable would require multiverses and still wouldn't explain observable reality in this universe. In other words, God has the same statistical chance of existing as does Bugs Bunny or J. Alfred Prufrock.

(The next two paragraphs were not in the original letter.)

Let me talk about math for a little bit, because I’m abysmal at it. Nonetheless, if I have faith in anything, it’s math. I have faith in it primarily for two reasons: A) no matter how many times I look at it, 2+2=4; and B) my television works. Now, I don’t understand the connection between 2+2 and my television, but I do know that, if all the numbers don’t line up properly, my television won’t work. I know they can figure out the numbers so accurately that they can put a car on the surface of Mars; so I’ve got good faith that when they tell me the universe is 13.7 billion light-years across, I believe them. I have faith they’re telling me the truth. I have not personally done the math myself, but I have faith that it’s being done correctly.

Ergo, what happened prior to the Big Bang is a mathematical question, at this point, and the math isn’t pointing to any god. The math, right now, is pointing to multiverses which makes a lot more sense. If you were to plot a curve of our understanding of our place in the universe, it would show an exponential expanding of that understanding, from being in the center of the world, to being on a planet around which the sky revolved, to being part of a solar system, to being part of a universe. Logically, it makes sense that there’s something beyond the universe; turns out it wasn’t God but rather more universes. In other words, the math has never pointed towards God. The math never points to a deus ex machina.

(Back to the letter.)

So, yeah, God has an infinitely small possibility of existing, at least in a form any religion on Earth would recognize as God. Which is why I said to not defeat us atheists by positing an argument we don't use. It means you didn't understand the argument or were deliberately misstating it to win your point.

Sam Harris

Pardon me here for nattering on. I was looking for an image of Mr. Deem to accompany this post when I ran across the following statement where he’s critiquing Sam Harris:

“The fact that Harris himself acknowledges that he cannot live up to his own moral values calls into question whether ‘science can determine human values’ in any meaningful way.”

That’s the sort of statement that makes me question the education they’re handing out at Mr. Deem’s alma mater, California State University of Los Angeles. Richard is saying that, because people don’t necessarily follow their moral prescripts, that those prescripts couldn’t have come from evolution? Richard, science isn’t in the business of determining moral codes; science is in the business of learning where moral codes come from. Who does or doesn’t follow a moral code has no influence on where that code comes from. That’s fairly elementary logic. Given that there’s absolutely no observational hint that there’s any sort of god functioning in our world, it makes sense that morality is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Logically, it can be no other way.

The last quote from Deem showed up in paragraph four of his essay, so you can see why I never get beyond the beginnings of apologetics polemics. It’s hard to want to read further when confronted early on with such basic errors. See why I worry about his education?

The Skeptic In Me

I found the debate on the Skeptic website. The debaters aren’t important, except that one of them was Shermer, the Skeptic guy. (Too bad “skeptic” sounds so much like “septic.”) The debate was, “Has science made religion irrelevant?” It was a two-hour debate and I didn’t get through but forty-five minutes before I had to go to sleep.

What makes me leery is that I found the debate on the Skeptic site, so how objective could it be? Am I right to be skeptical? Not that I disagreed with Mr. Shermer, but I wondered about the quality of the opponents, were they the best he could find?

If I can characterize the pro-religion arguments, one proposed that there is more than one kind of knowledge, and the other posited that there is a lot science doesn’t know know. Now, both statements are prima facie true, but neither a priori demonstrates the relevance of religion.

Taking the knowledge argument first, the fellow could have had a point. He could have talked about emotional understanding, he could have talked about spiritual reverence for the universe, he could have talked about the educational and societal values of folk tales as allegory. Instead, he tried to argue that miracles happen. Really, that’s what he did. He tried to argue that A) there’s nothing to say God can’t put aside the laws of physics whenever he (it’s always a “he” for these folk) wants; and B) because miracles only happens one at a time at the will of God, there’s no way to scientifically test them. Furthermore, if you didn’t buy that argument, he’s witnessed miracles himself. So there. Are you going to call him a liar?

Or delusional? The third option is that he’s telling the truth, but, of course, there’s no way to verify that. Furthermore, there’s no way for him to tell if he’s delusion or simply misinterpreting data. But, to accept the third option requires a belief in its possibility. And because of the inability to test the proposition of miracles, it’s the same as believing in God. And it has the same value in a debate: none. One can’t argue that miracles are true because they’ve witnessed them; it’s that the old circular argument. It’s no more valid than saying the Bible is true because it’s the word of God.

Which is why I was suspicious of him as a choice; was he chosen because he’s an easy target and doesn’t mind humiliation, or do his delusions extend to his intelligence?

I didn’t listen to all the second pro-religion fellow’s speech, but his opening drift was that there were enormous questions for which science has no answer, such as what came before the Big Bang? Now, that’s a fairly common argument, although relatively recent as it couldn’t have been put forth before science discovered the Big Bang in the first place. It’s conceding the argument before it’s begun. As soon as one accepts the Big Bang, God becomes irrelevant. Sorry, just does. Science is the process of discovery and to say that religion is free to guess about what’s left, is true but in itself irrelevant.

Still, it’s another case of missed argument. While there’s no way to justify religious interpretation of physical reality, because religion is still so important to so many people, an understanding of religion and the psychology of religious belief is crucial to understand the world. But, of course, that’s not what he was arguing. He was arguing that, despite religion being wrong about all other physical realities, it could still be right about what we don’t yet know about. Got that? It’s a tad convoluted.

Again, while that’s logically true, it’s also irrelevant. It’s the sort of argument one should never bring up if they want to look like they’ve eaten their Wheaties.

The question is: were these pro-god guys thrown to the lions because they were schlemiels, or are they the best the believers have to offer? My suspicion is they’re the guys who like to take the bait and who think they can win the argument head-on. I want to say it’s a waste of talent, but obviously it isn’t.

The issue is: no one ever comes to religion logically. That’s not the path. They come to religion through a personal experience they believe holds its own truth and they unite with others of a like mind, just as people who believe they’ve been taken up in spacecrafts by little green, probing men tend to flock together. It’s a belief to which logic is irrelevant.

Did science make religion irrelevant? Did football make golf irrelevant? Did the automobile make walking irrelevant? Did irrigation make praying for rain irrelevant?

Science? Religion? They’re different fish; they don’t swim in the same waters. Sometimes believer fish want to swim in the science waters, but it doesn’t work; they die there. Nothing makes religion irrelevant other than personal experience. Either the light strikes you and you see, “Oh, that’s how it works!” or it strikes you and you proclaim, “It’s a miracle!” Either way, it’s your experience and yours alone. Take it out in the night and look for an honest man; see what you can find.

Pray that you're not a young child.

Revelations

 I love revelations. Not the capital “R,” the ones that happen when you least expect it. The epiphanies, the eureka moments. The ones that confirm my suspicion that we don’t do any conscious thinking at all; it’s all done at the neural or sub-neural level. It took me seventy years to understand this:

The interesting question is not, why is religion universal, but why isn’t it? It used to be. When did the case for religion begin to break down and why? And why has it spread?

There were branches of Eastern religions that espoused a no-god philosophy, but they managed to do it within a structured, religious context; and, inevitably, their sects reverted to more recognizable theisms.

The Greeks could hardly have avoided atheism, but it could still have been punished by pain of death in the wrong circumstances; and the death penalty came back with a vengeance with Christianity. Even today, I wouldn’t advise walking in downtown Kabul and shouting, “Allah is a fuck-head.” You know what I mean?

But likewise, I wouldn’t have gone into downtown Moscow in 1945 and hollered, “Stalin is a fuck-head,” either. State atheism is no saint.

As much as anything, one has to ask, how come it’s such an emotional issue, this religious stuff? Why do people kill over it? Why do they worry about it when they get married? Why do they make such a fuss over it? Curious minds want to know. Like mine, for example.

Like theism, there are multiple forms of atheism from the quasi-religious forms to the brutal state-sponsored forms—what business is it of the state’s, anyway?—and all sorts of philosophical positions in between; but the atheism that concerns me most is the “popular” atheism. As is, “Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

I think that pretty much sums up atheism for the common person. It’s a rational question to which one can give a rational answer and not expect to be burned at the stake. Anymore. No big deal. Unless you happen to be in Alabama. Or Nigeria. Or a courtroom.

We can thank the Enlightenment for the spread of science, of education. Inch by inch it spreads to all corners of the globe (a globe has corners?) and where it spreads, so does atheism. Like blight on a birthday cake: ooo, there goes the frosting. It’s spread is not uniform; vast areas of both the country and the world are unaffected or lightly so. It’s progress is not smooth, the forces against it would still like to kill.

Yet, apparently, it’s inevitable. Apparently, the forces pushing atheism are the same forces reducing violence and the number of babies being born. It appears that, in some senses, the cures to our problems are spontaneous. Who would have known that population expansion was not exponential but on a bell curve? Who would have known?

In retrospect, the advent of public atheism was inevitable just as was the scientific revolution. Indeed, just as every day is inevitable.

All in all, though, for a subject so central to our time—the spread of rationalism—it’s amazingly understudied. Perhaps it’s taken for granted. Didn’t I just say it was inevitable?

Aren’t you glad you took this train?

Deliver Us from Evil

A Documentary about Oliver O’Grady
Catholic Priest and Pedophile
Currently at Large in Ireland

But is it? Evil? Is the problem the Catholic Church? Is the problem ever the church? Any church?

Is our problem with the Muslims, the Mormons, the Fundamentalists, or the Jews? The Jains, the Buddhists, the Hindus, or Voudoun?

Should we be concerned about the Unitarians?

What should be done with Oliver O’Grady? Hundreds of children? Their mothers? What should be done with Bishop Mahoney (who protects pedophiles) or the Pope?

What should be done about people who blow themselves up, just to kill you? Is there a source for evil? Is there a source for good? What is evil and what is good? How does a person do one or the other? Who is judging? What are the rules?

It’s not so easy, is it?

It begins with babies, no? Either they start out evil or something along the way makes them do evil things. Either they have crossed wiring or bad chemistry, or experience taught them evil was the best solution.

But then, is it evil if they think it’s the best response available? When we confront evil, our instinct is to punish it. Besides correct it, of course.

We rarely look beyond our instinct. Punishment gives us satisfaction, it gives us revenge, which is what we want. We have been injured and we want someone to pay for it. We want, at the very least, the satisfaction of revenge.

That’s usually where we stop thinking. We rarely ask, do we want to change the evil behavior? Do we want to protect our society from evil?

As to the first question, we don’t have much interest in that other than how it relates to the second question. We mainly care about evil when it affects us. We’re only interested in redemption so far as it offers us protection. Unfortunately, instead of redemption we offer more incarceration. We’re more willing to try deterrent than reform, which may be an economic response rather than a rational response.

But punishment, aside from the satisfaction, implies that those babies had a choice about their wiring or their life experience. I don’t know about that; I just don’t know. My gut feeling says that, when evil shows up, something went wrong. Some connections were loose or somebody got a bad education.

How willing a choice did Father O’Grady make? It’s true, he molested hundreds of people, both sexes; and it’s true, he disassociates himself from his crimes (at one point he wanted to have all his victims—in California—come to Ireland together so he could say he was sorry); but what kind of punishment makes sense? Whipping? Stocks? Emasculation? Throw him in a hole at our expense?

Or the Church? What should we do about the Church? Were they not complicit? Didn’t they hide him and shelter him? Didn’t they sexually abuse him when he was a child?

What about his brother or his sister with whom he had sex? Are they complicit, too? What should we do about them?

It gets sticky, doesn’t it?

A suggestion, if you will:

Regardless of the origins of O’Grady’s evil, it was able to spread and go on for so long and still be protected, because of the authority and power of the Catholic Church. Yet the Catholic Church is only one of many churches and mosques and synagogs that operate in essentially the same way: they all require a suspension of rational observation in favor of faith-based belief. The crucial element is not in what you believe, but rather that you are willing to believe in the irrational. The goal is to get you to give up your powers of observation in favor of the party line (herd instinct). Once you believe in the unbelievable, you’ll believe in anything. And once you believe in the unbelievable, you are united with all other people who share the same belief; and those who don’t are your enemies. That’s a vital power for any oligarchy to have over its tribe. It’s so powerful it’s universal and ancient.

What it leads to—and one sees this time and again in the documentary—is people, unthinkingly giving their powers of observation over to other people, to designated authorities. These people really believe in the cloak of piety. These people invited Father O’Grady into their homes to rape their children. They couldn’t believe God could be the source of evil.

That’s the same God who sends children strapped with bombs into crowded marketplaces or sends teenage girls into polygamous marriages or butchers homosexuals. Once they believe…

Can anything be done about it?

Well, not very quickly. We could start by talking about religion. We could put two and two together and see how religion runs as a common theme through so many of our national and international problems that we might want to start taking a closer look at the role religion plays in our communities.

We could start in the schools. We could start in the grade schools. We could have comparative religion taught from kindergarten on. We could teach little kids about the many varieties of faith as an element of culture, and we should treat it as a folk art, along with songs, dances, art, etc. We could teach little kids about the differences between belief and non-belief. As they got older, we could teach students about the role of religion in society; how different societies incorporate religion into their structure. How, for example, does religion affect international alliances? How do religious charities affect the government’s need to supply social programs? Why are some religious issues settled at the ballot box?

Is there any chance of this?

No.

But it would be a good start. And, I believe, it would work. But, then again, I believe in the Enlightenment and I believe in the Emancipation Proclamation. What a fool I am.

On the other hand, I’ve got two things going for me: time and truth. Time will tell.

Christians Aren't Perfect Just Forgiven

[Bumper sticker, late 20th century.]

A position oft expressed goes: if there is no god, there is no meaning or direction to life and consequently one can behave however one wishes. It’s said so often and so matter-of-factly, that in most discussions about morality and its origins, that position is virtually a given. It is, one can safely say, the official American political opinion. There may be more enlightened countries around the globe, but if you want to get elected in the United States, you’d better adhere to the principle that morality is directed from above.

Which means, of course, that our country is run by arrogant fools and liars, but that’s another story.

The problems, though, go beyond electioneering. The curse of monotheism has been to create a race of zombies willing to do anything the power structure asks of it, including killing people who are in its way, for one reason or another. It’s not just a theoretical discussion, we have here. The pervasive claws of monotheism scratch at the tiniest corners of our society. They leave no mouse unscathed. The great bulk of our prison population, for example, is not a mass of murderers and mayhem, but of people there for cultural differences, not crimes. We criminalize many things in our society which in and of themselves are not crimes; consequently, the overwhelming majority of people in prison in this country are there for drug offenses, and drug choice is strictly controlled by religious content. They are not arrested for the effect the drug has upon them or society, but merely upon its illegality. One can safely say that all drug offenders in this country are there because of the illegal nature of their product, and not because of anything their product caused people to do. Almost all crime related to drug use is caused by the illegal nature of the drug—and this goes for any illegal drug—and not its pharmacological action. In and of itself it’s rarely a criminal issue and almost as rarely a societal one, other than one man’s meat being another’s poison. But as soon as one starts declaring, simply because they can, that another man’s meat is illegal, all hell breaks loose.

You’ll note that prohibition of alcohol—known in the Muslim world as the “Christian diversion”—lasted only a few years, while the prohibition of other drugs continues in this country to this day. At the rate we’re going, we’ll humanize our laws only slightly before Singapore. (You’ll note that Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico have decriminalized personal drug use across the board, following the European examples of Portugal, Holland, Switzerland, and on.) But one thing you can be sure of about Americans, we might have the last band in the parade, but it sure as hell will be the loudest.

But I digress.

Nonetheless, the claim of religious origins for morality is so ingrained in our culture that even humanists worry sometimes that there might be a “god” gene in there somewhere that necessitates religion; and they often have trouble knowing where everyday, drugstore morality could come from. As if it were a great mystery. How do we know how to be good, unless someone tells us how? Besides our moms and dads, of course.

Well, OK. Bears and wolves and lions and tigers have no religion, right? They can’t possibly “know God” in any meaningful sense. There’s nothing stopping the top-dog lion, as it were, from killing all his rivals, right?

Except that there is. For the most part, lions and tigers and wolves and bears don’t kill their rivals. Certainly nothing at the rate that humans do. When it comes to killing their own kind, we are the masters.

So, what’s stopping them? The religious response would be that God has programmed the animals to behave as they do. It’s all part of the great design. The humanist response is deceptively similar and simple: animal behavior is innate and was worked out through evolution. In either scenario, the animal has no choice. But here is where the problem gets sticky. The assumption is made that humans are fundamentally different from all other animals; and that because we intellectually realize that we can make choices, we assume that our behavior is governed by that ability and not by innate patterning. It’s that belief which dictates the academic stricture to not anthropomorphize, assuming that we are fundamentally isolated from all other species.

Needless-to-say, the assumptions don’t survive scrutiny.

The fundamental problem with a religious origin for morality is the question of what happened pre-religion? What happened when we were a “mere” animal like all the others? Were we naught but wanton killing machines (not that we aren’t now)? Did we only propagate by rape? How did we manage to not eat all our children, if we didn’t know right from wrong? Or, did the desire to eat ones children only come with the epiphany of right and wrong? I realize that these question edge upon the absurd, but they point to the complications of equating religion with morality (or is that vice-versa?).

On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that tool use predated religion (I don’t think chimps have religion), and it’s hard to know how tool (read “weapon”) use affected the balance of environmental forces. It’s hard to know at this remove how sudden, vast increases in weapon power affected killing rates, but it’s equally hard to imagine that it was negligible. Once it’s easy to kill a buffalo, it’s easy to kill a rival. Perhaps religion evolved as a counterweight to big, sharp rocks, something to curb our wanton tendencies. But my best guess is that religion was invented to fill the gap between practical information and wondering where the hell this all came from. Religion as a byproduct of self-reflection. Its use in society is much more complicated than that, but I believe that is its genesis.

Morality, on the other hand, existed prior to cognition. Morality is inherent in all animals. Probably all plants, too, for that matter, but I can’t vouch for that. But there’s no question each species is governed by its own set of rules as to what it can and can’t do. Mainly eat. And most of the time it excludes ones own species (except for guppies and sometimes other competitors’ children). It only makes sense that each species has evolved with a strict code of cooperation which insures the maximum survival of ones species; to be otherwise would be inherently impossible. Deviation from those rules, one could argue, is impossible; at least not until self-reflection surfaces. One can argue that evil only exists because we can think of it. Prior to thought, it was impossible for evil to exist; it is a strictly human construct.

But the rise of self-reflection didn’t eliminate the power of inherent intra-species rules, i.e. morality. Simply because one was suddenly capable of thinking that, “Gee, I could kill my nasty neighbor,” doesn’t mean that they would automatically do so. Surely, even from the very beginning of cognition there were deeply felt urges compelling one to specific behaviors. What one should and shouldn’t do existed long before anyone gave it any thought. All thinking did was give us the power to do what we shouldn’t.

And we’ve been arguing about it ever since. Needless-to-say, this entire argument is arcane to anyone who believes we were created in situ, as such, by God; and offhand I don’t know of any way of getting through to people like that. If you believe we were all plunked down here, fully formed, 6000 years ago, there’s nothing I can say that will alter any argument we might have.

Yet even a belief in evolution doesn’t prevent some people from thinking that evolution itself is divinely inspired and that the recognition of morality was programmed to coincide with the recognition of self.

The answer to which is: well, yeah, maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it quite yet; and at the very least it doesn’t answer but only postpones and confuses the issue. After all, if you don’t have a personal god, you don’t have much of a god at all. If all a god does is set the rules and the ball in motion with a Big Bang, what kind of god is that? If the god doesn’t care about life on earth because it’s such a minuscule part of the universal story, how is that a god? And if the god really does care about what you do here on earth, how believable is that?

Once one has accepted evolution and the tenants of observational science, the question of god’s existence becomes moot. But the question of from whence morality is not moot and is open to all manner of interpretation. To begin with, it’s essentially tautological to say it’s inherent. The question then becomes, how do inherent moralities play out in the confusion of self-reflection? Certainly, religions step in early on as arbiters of what’s right and wrong, but they forever remain a gloss over our inherent natures. We know what’s right and wrong without anyone telling us. If you don’t believe me, ask any little kid. (After that ask any teenage girl.)

As we’ve already noted, without self-reflection it’s impossible for a member of a species to act contrary to the species’ rules, as it were. The underlying compulsion, however you want to look at it, is to get along.

And that compulsion does not go away simply because we become self-reflective and capable of acting contrary to our compulsions. Our compulsion is to cooperate and get along, but the confusion of self-reflection, especially when poorly understood, allows us to act contrary to our best interests, sometimes with disastrous results. The compulsion to cooperate and get along drives all of our behavior from fundamentals, such as speech and mannerisms, to cultural overlays, such as style and religion; and it’s not hard to twist a desire to conform into a tool dividing us from them. Once you corner the market on good, you can commit all sorts of evil in its name.

Which brings us to the sanctity of religion.

Let me observe that there is no such thing as a religious war. No god has ever told anyone to go kill anyone else. It has never happened. All decisions to kill people are made by people for people reasons: i.e. control/power. The reasons may be couched in religion and the combatants might think they’re going out there for the defense of religion, but someone always knows its a bunch of hooey and that they’re doing it for them. The person pulling the strings always knows it’s poppycock.

So why does religion get a free pass? Why does it get sanctified, if all it does it turn people into meat puppets?

Because it does it so well.

It does it so well that lots of people can’t imagine life without it. In fact, they’d rather kill than go without it. In fact, they’re often willing to kill you, even if all you want is to go without it.

Maybe now it’s getting clearer why monotheism was so important. Someone had to take control of the incredible power of religion. To leave morality scattered in the hands of multiple gods was not good for war. Better to have only one. Much easier.

The bottom line, of course, has always been the Golden Rule. The Ten Commandments are rather useless, being primarily concerned with religious power, and totally hit-and-miss with their few practical suggestions. You shouldn’t commit murder, that’s for sure (that’s number 6), and you shouldn’t commit adultery, steal, lie, nor—God forbid—even covet your neighbor’s riding lawn mower (that’s number 10), but apparently, if you’re not married, it’s perfectly all right to rape your neighbor’s wife, so long as you don’t covet her. It’s a fine distinction.

In any event, it’s easy to see where one’s natural urges, when it comes to right and wrong, are more reliable than religious prescription. The Golden Rule is ten times safer than the Ten Commandments. Trust me. Yet it doesn’t even make the list. Why is it not on the list? Because it’s not good for manipulation. It’s hard to convince people that they should make war on another people because they so much want war brought upon themselves. It’s a hard sell. On the other hand, with the current list, all you have to have is someone worshipping another god (or none at all) and your first commandment is to do something about it. You get to think of what to do. What do you think you should do to someone who violates the first rule in the list of “the ten most important rules”? Remember, this is six places above murder. What should you do, if a whole nation thumbs their nose at your god? (Actually, God doesn’t leave the choice of what to do about those nose-thumbers to you. He says kills them. Read Deuteronomy, if you’d like more of the same.)

You can see how important it becomes to have that god and protect its sanctity above all else. The blind compulsion to follow is the most potent organizing tool a society has. It’s inherent.

The real question then becomes, if it’s inherent, how do some people escape it? From whence rationalism and the Enlightenment? Are not rationalism and enlightenment as much a product of self-reflection as evil? Or for that matter, good itself? How does one escape the compulsion to follow the crowd?

Beats me, but it’s the great divide in the human race. Forget about race, religion, sex, country of origin. The great human divide is whether or not you’re able to give yourself over to someone else’s direction. Are you able to let someone else make your ethical decisions for you? If you are, you’re simply following the ancient necessity to fit in with the “the species”; it’s where you’re safe. How are people willing and able to abandon that security and make those decisions for themselves? For that matter, how does one get to the position of making those decisions for other people? Certainly, the clues lie in self-reflection. Eventually climbing the holy hierarchy, one comes to the realization that moral decisions are made by people, not holy writ. If you’re honest, you’ll eventually get to the point where you realize that the voices in your head are the product of your own imagination, not the outside voice of God.

But it’s not an easy realization to have or live with. Every person who realizes that morality is both an individual responsibility and a species necessity, has to make their own moral choices. They cannot rely on exterior authority. Guidance, yes, but authority, no. In the end, all moral decisions are personal. One can only make them for oneself.

Which is why that bumper sticker is so scary. Indeed, Christians can be absolved of their sins. They can have them washed away by the blood of Christ. Which means anything done in the name of God can be forgiven. War, torture, excommunication, burning at the stake; they’re all okay in the eyes of the Lord. And in the eyes of his believers. The people who run religions know that. They know they use their flock as canon fodder, if not just milk cows. They know that if you believe that the majority of the people believe a particular brand of religion, there’s good chance you’ll believe it too, unexamined.

The “unexamined” part is important. One constant of all religions is the requirement to believe in the absurd, because once you’ve accepted the impossible, nothing any longer is. Any realistic appraisal of any religion will immediately point up its absurdity, so it’s crucial that believers do so blindly. The choice, when the church has been able, is to kill people who examine their religion. No religion can withstand objective scrutiny, so it’s necessary to require believers to accept the absurd; to believe that God really is directing them when they speak in tongues. In any other instance, having voices in your head is a sign of insanity, but not if you claim that voice is that of God. That argument gets a special pass.

So, if you’re a Christian, you’re forgiven of your sins while the rest of us have to behave properly or suffer guilt. You, thank God, can avoid the suffering of guilt by simply believing you are forgiven for your sins. Sort of takes away the incentive not to commit them, doesn’t it. It’s nice to have a free pass.

In the end, it’s religions which encourage people to act barbaric, while non-believers are responsible for their own behavior. One understands that religious people behave morally by accident, not by conscious thought. The job of religion is not to make sure that people act properly, except in the sense of following its own special codes. The job of religion is to make sure people follow its authority. Monotheism in particular has little social value beyond population control. (You might, for example, think of the control aspects of charity versus insuring a decent standard of living for all. Charity is so much more powerful than developing self-reliance.)

We will quit this diatribe here. It’s a lonely diatribe, anyway.

But let me leave you with the admonition to be responsible. Don’t hand you soul to anyone else. Only you can prevent forest fires.