The Two Creations: Why Genesis Can't be Taken Literally

In the last few months I've found myself doing something I swore off years ago: arguing with creationists. I had stopped because I realized you can't convince most of them that evolution is true, no matter how good you think your arguments are, or how much evidence you offer them. The problem is that creationism and science proceed in entirely different directions. Creationism takes it on faith that Genesis is literally true, and then (sometimes) seeks to find arguments that support that claim. Science (ideally) looks at nature, and then proposes theories that seem to explain it. If the theory seems to match the evidence, it's retained. If it doesn't, it's discarded.

So, with creationism, belief comes before evidence, while in science, evidence comes before belief. Darwin didn't start with a belief in evolution, and then set out to prove it. He observed the natural world, and then proposed a theory that seemed to explain it. Creationism values faith above all, while science values empirical evidence above all. That's why debating a creationist is like playing basketball with someone who refuses to count your baskets, and insists they've already won no matter how well you play. They've made up their minds that Genesis is literally true, so they aren't particularly interested in hearing reasons it might not be. I'm no Galileo, but it always makes me think about how he must have felt when people refused to even look through his telescope.

In other words, it's absolutely maddening, so I had given up the creation/evolution debate. For years, the topic rarely came up, because I wasn't around many people who liked to discuss it, and the ones who did took creationism no more seriously than Norse mythology. Honestly, I had forgotten how many Americans are biblical literalists who believe Genesis is fact, not parable or myth. Then came Facebook, which put me back in touch with old friends and family members, and gave me a window into their thoughts. They are good, funny, smart people, most of them—and an astounding number of them believe the Earth is just a few thousand years old. I was shocked by that, and they were shocked by me. Creationism and biblical literalism are certainly not uncommon. Gallup polls show that nearly 50% of people in the US think "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."  Around 30% of people in the US agree with the statement  that "the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word."

The difference between mainstream scientific views and young earth creationism is a huge one. If the earth is really 4.56 billion years old, and creationists think it's 6 to 10 thousand years old, that's equivalent to saying Texas is ten feet across. If mainstream science is right, then creationists aren't just a little bit wrong. They're outrageously, spectacularly wrong. From my perspective, hearing someone say the earth is a few thousand years old is just about as bewildering, and admittedly frustrating, as hearing someone insist that Texas is the width of a mobile home.

Anyway, I found myself in the creation/evolution debate again, but I soon remembered why I had stopped. There's no point in trying to convince creationists using scientific evidence. They're playing a different game; a game based on faith. So I decided to try to understand where they're coming from, and take another look at the creation story in Genesis.

And a fascinating story it is. One surprising thing is how short it is. In my New Oxford Annotated Bible, it's only a little over 5 pages from “In the beginning” to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden—and half of those pages are footnotes. Another surprising thing is that there isn't just one creation story. There are two, and they are very different. I had always heard this, but it's amazing to read them and see just how different they are.

The first (Genesis 1:1 through 2:3) is the one that describes the creation of the world in six days, and God resting on the seventh. In this version, the original Hebrew text calls God “Elohim”; which is basically a generic name for “god” or “deity”. The second narrative (Genesis 2:4 through 25) refers to God as Yahweh in the original Hebrew. If I understand it correctly, Yahweh is the personal name of this particular god (apparently, the early Hebrews believed in many gods, but came to worship the one named Yahweh exclusively. Only later did they come to believe there were no other gods). The name Yahweh is rendered in many Bibles as “the LORD”.

Before I get into what the two narratives say, a little background on Genesis as a whole might be useful. Genesis, of course, is the first book in the Old Testament. It describes the creation of the world, the fall of Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph—the lineage thought to give rise to the Jews. Genesis is the first of the five books traditionally thought to have been dictated by God to Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Jews call these five books the Torah, and Christians call them the Pentateuch. In the late Renaissance, when the risk of being killed or imprisoned for heresy began to decline, people started pointing out that the Torah/Pentateuch, like the rest of the Bible, gives the distinct impression of having been written by more than one person, in more than one style. In the 1800's, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen proposed that the first five books of the Bible were composed by four different people (or groups of people) who he called J (for Jahweh, German for Yahweh, because this is what J calls God), E (because this source calls God “Elohim”), P (for Priestly), and D (for Deuteronomist, because this source wrote much of Deuteronomy as well as some later books in the Old Testament). This line of thinking is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The idea has been hugely influential, though it's become more controversial since the 1970's. Still, the basic idea that the Pentateuch was written by different people at different times is still accepted by all but the most conservative biblical scholars, and clear to anyone who takes a close look at both stories in Genesis.

The First Creation Story

The first creation narrative in the bible is thought to be written by P, the Priestly author (or group of authors). This source depicts God as a distant, all-powerful deity who creates an orderly cosmos from a primeval, watery darkness. He does this with the power of words, beginning with, “Let there be light”. In this narrative, God (Elohim) separates light from darkness on the first day, and names them Day and Night. On the second day, he divides the primordial waters by raising the dome of the sky, which separates the waters below from the waters above the dome. When this text was written, Hebrews thought of the Earth as a flat place surrounded by water. The sky was thought to be an actual, solid dome, and the sun, moon, and stars were lights embedded in the dome. In this narrative, there is water beyond the dome (a disconcerting thought, really). Later, Hebrews adopted the Greek idea that the world is a sphere, surrounded by a series of concentric domes. At the time this narrative was written, the world was not only thought to be the center of the universe, but a flat piece of ground in a dome-shaped bubble between primordial waters. Not even young-earth creationists these days are willing to take Genesis that literally.

On the third day, God creates land and commands it to bring forth plants. On the fourth, he says “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years”. Signs were important to the ancient Hebrews, who, like most other ancient people, took it for granted that you could see portents in the motion of the stars. God also creates the sun and moon, “the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night”. On the fifth day God creates sea creatures (including “great sea monsters”) and birds. On the sixth day he creates land animals, and then says “Let us make humankind in our image”. This “us” is a puzzler, and it may indicate an ancient belief that God was the head of a heavenly court or counsel. The other members may have also been considered gods early on, but as monotheism evolved they were demoted to angels, cherubim, and such. In this narrative, unlike the next, God seems to create male and female simultaneously. Then he tells them to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”. He also says he has “given every green plant for food,” implying that all living things were vegetarians at the time. On the seventh day of course, God rested, and “blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.”

The Second Creation Story

The second narrative is very different from the first, and is identified with J in the documentary hypothesis. It's most likely the older of the two stories. J is so-called because the writer refers to God as “Yahweh” ("Jahweh" in German), or “Yahweh Elohim”. Sure enough, Genesis 2.4 begins by saying, “In the day the LORD God [Yahweh Elohim] made the earth and the heavens...”. In this narrative, the earth begins as a place with no rain or vegetation, watered by a stream. Here, God creates humans before he creates plants and animals. Instead of creating him with a word, he takes a more intimate approach: “the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breathe of life; and the man became a living being.” This first man is called Adam; a Hebrew word for “humankind”, which is also a play on the word “adamah” or “soil”.

After Adam is created, God plants the Garden of Eden, a beautiful place whose trees include the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God tells Adam he may eat fruit from every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Only then, in this narrative, does God create the animals, letting Adam name each one. None of these are a fit “helper” or “partner” for Adam, though, so God makes Adam go to sleep, removes one of his ribs, and creates the first woman from it (some people to this day believe that men have one less rib than women).

The next part of the story is well known. The first couple is naked and unashamed at first, because they don't know the difference between good and evil. But a serpent (who really is just a serpent, and wasn't identified with the devil until later Christian thought) convinces the woman (she still doesn't have a name) that she won't really die if she eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He's right—she eats it, and gives some to Adam. They don't die, but they do realize they are naked, and scramble for the nearest fig leaves. Then they hear God walking through the garden “at the time of the evening breeze” (the author of this creation narrative saw God in much more earthly terms than the other author). The people hide from God, because they are naked. God says “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Adam fesses up, and God curses him, his wife, and the serpent. He tells the woman he will “greatly increase your pangs in childbearing”, and that her husband will rule over her (Adam soon names her Eve). He tells Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Then God says,“See, the man has become like one of us [there's that “us” again], knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” Rather than risk Adam and Eve gaining immortality, he casts them out of the garden, and leaves cherubim with flaming swords to guard the tree of life. Before long, Eve gives birth to Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a herder). God likes Abel's offerings of sheep, but not Cain's offerings of grain, so Cain slays Abel in a fit of jealousy. It's the first of many, many murders in the Bible. Genesis continues with the story of the flood, which is strikingly similar to older Sumerian flood myths, down to the boat, and the bird sent out to look for land.

Biblical scholars call the section of Genesis from the creation to the flood the “primeval history”, because it's a highly mythic story in which serpents talk and people live for hundreds of years. It's not just about the ancestors of the Jews, but of all people. After the flood, people all speak one language, and start cooperating to build the great tower of Babel. God decides once again that people are getting too big for their britches, and “confuses their tongues” and scatters them. The next major character is Abram, who comes from “Ur of the Chaldeans” (a historical city in Mesopotamia). He will soon be renamed Abraham, and will become the ancestor of the Jews.

Should We Take The Creation Stories as the Literal Truth?

I could get into when these two narratives were written, and what the political currents of the time might have been, or whether the Priestly narrative was based in part on the Babylonian story of the great god Marduk creating the universe from the slain corpse of Tiamat, but this post is getting long, and those topics are controversial among scholars. So I'll get back to the reason I'm writing about this. First, I want to understand where my biblical literalist/creationist friends are coming from. Second, I want to investigate the idea that the creation stories in Genesis could be the the infallible word of God, and therefore the absolute, literal truth. I'm not going to discuss the scientific consensus on human origins. I've accepted that creationists aren't impressed by scientific evidence. Rather, I'd like to meet the creationists on their own turf, and take a critical look at Genesis itself. Does it make sense to think of the two creation stories in Genesis as the literal truth?

In a word, no. The two stories were obviously written by different people, and they are completely divergent; even contradictory. The first says plants and animals were created before people. The second says people were created before plants and animals. Which is it? You can believe one is literally true, or that the other is literally true, but you can't logically believe both any more than you can believe a square circle is possible. They can't both be true at once. There are other difficulties, too. It's obvious that the writer of the first narrative thought of the world as flat, and at the center of the universe, and thought that the sky as an actual, solid dome. I don't mean to belittle that author. The earth looks like it's flat, and if you watch the stars turn, it really does look like they're embedded in fixed places in a great cosmic dome that arches over the earth, spinning around the axis of the North Star. The sun and moon really do seem to orbit the earth. So, it's understandable that the author was mistaken, but he was mistaken nonetheless. If you are truly going to take the Genesis creation story literally, then you would have to reject Copernicus as well as Darwin. You would even have to reject Ptolemy, and declare that the world is flat. Hardly anyone believes that these days, of course, and that's a good thing.

Even the most ardent fundamentalist doesn't take the Bible absolutely literally, though he might claim to. You can't take every word of the Bible literally, because it contradicts itself, and some of it, like the idea of the solid dome of the sky, has turned out to be undeniably false. Everybody who follows the Bible has to pick and choose which verses to follow, and which to ignore, otherwise every Christian, Jew, and Muslim today would follow every rule in Leviticus. I've never met anyone who doesn't interpret at least some part of the Bible metaphorically. Once I went camping with an ardent young-earth creationist. We were talking about religion, and I brought up the story in Matthew 19 where a rich young man tells Jesus he has followed the law, and wonders what else he should do to be assured of eternal life. Jesus tells him to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. The man goes away, dismayed. Jesus then tells his disciples—twice--how hard it is for a rich man to get into heaven: 

“Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 

When I asked my creationist acquaintance about this, he started telling me how the “eye of the needle” was really a narrow gate into Jerusalem. Here was a guy who was a literalist when it came to Genesis, but was only too happy to give an uncomfortable saying--from the mouth of Jesus himself--a metaphorical spin. It's true that Jesus did like parables, but there's no evidence for a gate called the "eye of the needle" in Jerusalem, and good reasons to think that this time, Jesus meant exactly what he said. But some people don't want to believe that, any more than they want to believe we came from monkeys.

My point is that nobody is a true biblical literalist, and it's a good thing, because if they were, we would still be acting like an ancient, violent, Iron Age tribe—stoning people to death for things like homosexuality and suspected witchcraft, owning slaves, wiping out rival peoples (like Joshua did at Jericho), and sequestering women in their “unclean” time of the month. Humankind has gotten, well, kinder since then, and less superstitious. At most, stories like the ones in Genesis should be taken as allegories, not seen as literally true. It's not clear that the even the original authors thought they should be taken literally, or they would have tried harder to iron out the inconsistencies. People like Karen Armstrong claim that people then were more comfortable thinking in mythic or allegorical terms than they are now. I don't know, but it's true that early Christian figures like St. Augustine and Origen thought Genesis should be seen as allegory. Consider the words of Augustine:

“It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are.”

This sounds a lot like the lament of many progressive Christians today, who are embarrassed by the literal-mindedness of their brethren. But we need to be careful even with allegory. St. Augustine, for example, based the idea of original sin on the fall of Adam and Eve. For hundreds of years, people pointed to Genesis as evidence that, not only are people basically bad, but it was women who got us into this sinful predicament in the first place. No wonder so many people have used the Bible to justify the subjugation of women. Even today, there are weddings where women are told to obey their husbands. Women still can't be priests in many denominations. Why? Partly because of the stories in Genesis.

We should know better these days. We've made a bit of progress in the 2,500-3,000 years since Genesis was written. Science has shown that men didn't come before women, and there is no reason to think there ever was a tree of knowledge of good and evil, much less a talking serpent. These stories read like mythology because they ARE mythology. That doesn't mean they are useless. They are actually rather beautiful in places, and they give us vital insights into how our ancient forebears thought; and where we came from culturally--just not biologically or cosmologically. The creation stories are valuable, but they should be taken with many, many grains of salt if we want to relate them to modern life. The Bible was written by many people, over many hundreds of years, in a violent and superstitious time. There's a great deal of wisdom in the Bible, but there are also innumerable horrors and hurtful superstitions. The Old Testament remains the most violent book I have ever read. Nobody takes it absolutely literally these days, even if they claim to. And that's a very good thing.

Left, Right, and Other Directions: Getting Over One-Dimensional Politics

During the French Revolution, members of the National Assembly began to sort themselves according to their politics. Traditionalist supporters of king and church sat on the right, while those favoring radical ideas like establishing a more secular republic sat on the left. The terms "left" and "right" stuck, and today we talk about a political spectrum spanning the range from communism on the far left to fascism on the far right.

It's a strange idea, really. For one thing, the directions are completely arbitrary. If the members of the National Assembly had sat in a different arrangement, today we might be talking about far-left Republicans and far-right Democrats. Also, the idea of a political spectrum implies that political views are simple enough to plot along a single dimension, and that everyone's political views can be accurately plotted on that line. They can't. I have a friend who is an absolute fire-breathing liberal...except that he's against gun control. Where do you put him on that line? You can't. Like most people, he's simply not one-dimensional.

The political spectrum is a crude instrument. It reminds me of one of those cheap radios which, instead of having separate knobs for bass and treble, simply has one labeled "tone". Still, these days in the United States, even the idea of a political spectrum seems to be too subtle for some people. We've slipped into either/or, black/white thinking. The center has not held. It's given way to a sort of no man's land where people fear to venture, for fear of being called a traitor.  The other day, I picked up a recent issue of The American Spectator. The first article in the magazine referred to Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, as "Judas" for saying nice things about how the Obama administration handled Hurricane Sandy. I've heard other moderate Republicans, like the Davids--Frum and Brookes--called traitors. Many on the right these days collapse everyone left of center into a big heap; lumping liberals, socialists, and even communists all together.

But liberals do the same things. Some of them see Obama as a traitor for some of his centrist--even right-leaning--policies (keeping Guantanamo Bay Prison open, for example). Some of them also consider it taboo to say nice things about the other side. I've had some very liberal friends get mad at me for saying far-right politicians might be decent people in some ways.

These days, in other words, we see politics less as a spectrum and more like this:

It's either/or. You're either a liberal or a conservative, in this view, and there's no room in the middle. It's like the tone dial on that cheap radio has gotten even less useful. It's become a switch, which forces you to choose bass or treble. If you try to step into the center, you'll find you have nowhere to stand. Move that way from either direction, and someone behind you will lump you with the other side and call you a traitor.

Maybe we should put the center back, and give it some respect. People tend to think of moderates as wishy-washy fencesitters. But that's not necessarily true. Some people carefully considere all the evidence for and against various issues, and the conclusions they draw happen to place them in the center. Those who think moderates must be too noncommittal to take a stand are subscribing to the simple-minded view that there are only two possible sides. Besides, moderation has a long and respectable history. As smart people like Aristotle and Buddha have reminded us, wisdom very often requires finding a balance between opposite extremes. Principled, thoughtful moderates should hold their head high, and tell both sides they have a right to be there.

But the center is a precarious place to be. It's less well-defined than left and right. Those in the center don't have a clearly defined group they can identify with, so there's a temptation to join one side or the other. Ideologues on both sides are suspicious of them. So, moderates can stay in the center and be glared at from both sides, or they can join a side and have clearly-defined allies. Contrary to the charges of wishy-washiness, it can be much more comfortable to take a side. In Elmer Kelton's Texas Ranger Trilogy, the sheriff trying to keep the peace says, "I'm just tryin' to stay in the middle ground". His wise preacher friend replies, "That can be the most dangerous place of all. People shoot at you from both sides."

With the human tendencies toward binary thinking and tribalism, being a moderate is like standing on a knife-edged ridge. If you're not careful, you'll roll down one side or the other, into one of the more well-defined groups. Maybe you'll have fiercer enemies then, but you'll also have fiercer friends. You'll have a well-defined identity, and a social support system. This may sound a bit like a slippery slope argument, but in this case the slope really is slippery. There's a lot of pressure to join one side or the other.

So, maybe instead of thinking in the binary bins of left and right, we should put the center back in its rightful, respectable place, as a well-defined group. Maybe this country needs a Moderate Party, so that the moderates have a place to call home.

Of course, this just divides the binary vision of politics into three categories--Left, Right, and Moderate--and that's still much too simplistic. It still lumps everyone on the right, and everyone on the left, together--as though there were no diversity on either side. But there's a great deal of diversity. Ronald Reagan was no Mussolini, and Barack Obama is no Lenin. People on both sides think there's a slippery slope from the moderate regions of the other side to the extreme regions. Some on the right, for example, think that if we institute universal healthcare, before long we'll be living in collective farms or gulags.

But I admit that as a moderate liberal, I've had the same thoughts in the opposite direction. George W. Bush really did remind me of Mussolini when he talked about the country "speaking with one voice". The little black bumper stickers that said "W. The President" scared me. I thought they smacked of fascism; of authoritarian ultra-nationalism and blind allegiance to a charismatic leader. I kept thinking of the quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross". Still, I doubt that W was really an American fascist. I think he would have stopped at some point and said, "That's far enough". But I wish he had said so more often.

It seems that some people on the left see the political spectrum like this:

While some on the right see it like this:

The right sees the left on a slippery slope that could tumble into communism, and the left sees the right on a slippery slope to fascism. But neither slope is as slippery as the other side thinks. I tend to be fairly liberal, and many of my friends are more liberal than me. But none of them are communists. I've only ever met two communists, and that was in Canada.  Liberal or not, I didn't identify with them. In fact, I thought both of them were loud-mouthed fools. I don't think I know anybody who is even a socialist, if by "socialist" you mean someone who thinks "the state should own most means of production". Most liberals are just that: liberals. They're not socialists, much less communists. And most conservatives are conservatives. They're not closet fascists or Nazis.

There's a lot of diversity along the political spectrum, and in the United States today, it may be that the only slippery slope is away from the center. But even if we think in terms of a spectrum instead of a binary opposition, we're still just thinking in terms of one dimension, and that's just not enough. I started to realize this in college. That was the heyday of campus political correctness, in the early '90's. While I'm glad we no longer refer to humankind as "Man", sometimes this movement went too far. Liberalism was starting to turn away from freedom of speech more than I liked, and I started thinking of the political spectrum as a sort of circle, where the farther you got toward either extreme, the less you were interested in preserving freedom.

But I was still thinking in one-dimensional terms, as though there were some law of nature that says politics must be plotted on a single line, however slope-y or circular. It makes more sense to just add another dimension, as the people at PoliticalCompass.org have done. They have added a dimension of authoritarianism versus libertarianism.

This gives us a two-dimensional chart. The left-right axis charts economic attitudes: if you're for extensive government control of the economy, you're on the far left, and if you're all about free markets, then you're on the far right. But your place on that axis might have nothing to do with your views on personal freedom. Someone on the left or right economically could still be a strong believer in civil liberties. On this chart, Stalin would be in the upper left, while Hitler or Mussolini would be just right of center at the top. Someone like George W. Bush would be somewhere in the upper right, but (hopefully) not that close to Mussolini. American libertarians, who are usually all for personal freedom about things like sex, drugs, and religion, but also pro-free market, would be in the lower right hand corner. The traditional left-right spectrum can't do justice to libertarianism at all.

But this chart has its drawbacks, too. Some authoritarians, for example, are all for tradition, while others are for revolution. The religious right in the US is authoritarian to varying degrees about traditional values, but Stalin and Mao were authoritarian in a completely non-traditionalist way--they wanted to overturn the traditional order. The chart above can't capture that difference well, because it defines left and right in purely economic terms. Some people handle this by taking a slightly different perspective, and separating social views from fiscal views, as in the chart below. You hear libertarians in the United States saying they are fiscal conservatives and social liberals. A libertarian might be farther right than Ronald Reagan on economic issues, but couldn't care less about people's religion, sex life, or drug use.

But this chart still just shows two-dimensions.  To capture the traditionalism dimension as well as the authoritarianism/libertarianism dimension, and the left-right economic dimension, you would have to have a three-dimensional chart: a cube. But that would be hard to visualize.  Besides, what if we added another dimension? Nobody can visualize a four-dimensional chart. It's better to visualize more than two dimensions as shown below. Now we've upgraded the stupid little "tone" knob. Now we have an equalizer. We're Hi-Fi.

Now we can start to do justice to the range of views people really have, especially those who can't be accurately placed on the simple left-right spectrum (and most people can't). Here we can see how a moderate liberal who values civil liberties (me), compares to an authoritarian communist like Stalin. Regardless of what some people think about liberals, we're not that close:

Of course, there are many more factors that determine a person's politics than these three, and other ways of dividing them. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has parsed political attitudes in a different way, along five different dimensions that affect peoples' political leanings: "1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity".  (I described these in detail in this post). The "authority" dimension is similar to the one in the Political Compass chart above, but views on economic policy and traditionalism are divided into multiple other dimensions. In the chart below, we can see how American liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and Tea Party supporters differ on these dimensions.

Now, in all the charts above, we're talking about people's attitudes in general. We're not talking about particular political issues. But the traditional left-right spectrum fails us when it comes to those, too, as in the case of my gun-toting-but-otherwise-liberal friend. So why not divide those up too, and tackle each one on its own terms, rather than lumping them together? After all, why should your stance on abortion have anything to do with your stance on gun control, or gay marriage? Maybe a common set of values informs your opinions on all three, as it does for many in the religious right, or maybe it doesn't, as with libertarians.  It makes more sense to picture each issue as a separate knob on a political equalizer, like the one above, except with particular issues instead of general attitudes.

That's a whole lot more sophisticated than the left-right spectrum, to say nothing of the liberal vs. conservative dichotomy. But it's still a little too simple. Because if we focus in on most issues, we'll find that they are really a set of issues. For example, the range of possible views about abortion can't be captured by setting a knob somewhere along the pro-choice/pro-life axis. What about someone who is pro-choice up until the fetus can experience pain, and pro-life afterward? We would have to put such a person somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but it would be more accurate to just have a more complex scale--an abortion attitudes equalizer, perhaps. Or maybe it would be better to forget the graphics at this point and describe in words the nuances of that person's belief.

That's the thing: all labels and graphics are limited. They're just maps, not the territory itself. The more detailed the map, the better (within reason), but no map captures the full complexity of the political landscape. Some may say we should keep things simple, and that all these nuances about politics are too complicated. Well, reality is complicated, and our political views need to be complicated enough to navigate that reality honestly, if not always effectively. People forget that. They forget that reality is more complicated than our simple dichotomies, and even our sophisticated charts. When they mistake the maps for reality, they start thinking reality is as simple as their maps are. It isn't.

Political labels tend to short-circuit independent thought. As soon as we label ourselves as liberals, conservatives, libertarians, or whatever, we're in danger of thinking: I'm a ___________ therefore I think ___________. That's backwards. What we should do is decide independently what we think about each issue, based on a careful consideration of the facts and arguments, instead of how we were raised, how we label ourselves, or what our friends think.

Of course, that's hard to do. We don't have time to research all the issues, we have different psychological predispositions and biases, and it's easier to follow a crowd and buy an ideology as a package deal. In fact, it's hard not to, because political groups have more to do with tribal loyalty than critical thinking. Whether you're part of the liberal tribe or the conservative tribe, tribalism is a powerful force. Break ranks on a hot issue, and you're sure to be criticized, and possibly ostracized.

These are all real issues, but none of them have much to do with truth. In fact, they all get in the way of it. Tribalism, in particular, is a lousy way of figuring out what's true and right. People should think very carefully before calling people traitors because they've drawn a different conclusion than the rest of their peers. No worthwhile ideology should seek to protect itself from dissent. If what we're seeking is truth, not ideology, the idea of betraying an ideology is nonsensical. Our loyalty should lie with truth, not ideology. If the ideology is wrong, we shouldn't believe it anymore. If we think something because someone tells us to, or because that's what people with our label are supposed to think, we're not actually thinking. We have to learn to think first, and apply labels second. Or maybe we should just ditch the labels altogether, so we'll remember to think for ourselves.

Beyond Belief

I haven't posted in a while, partly because of holiday travels, but mostly because I've been composing my thoughts in private messages to some of my friends. After I wrote a post about the idea of God, I got into discussions with some more conservative Christian friends, and very interesting discussions they've been. One thing that came up is the importance of beliefs versus actions. For many Protestants, it is belief alone, not actions, that determines whether you go to heaven or hell. If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that he died to atone for your sins, that is what gets you into heaven. Being a good person is important, but it's not what decides your fate in the afterlife. The official doctrine of many Protestant denominations is that if you live a good life, devoting yourself to helping others, but don't accept Jesus as your savior, you'll go to hell.

Clearly, whether this is true or not is a matter of no small importance (for the record, I don't think it is, for all kinds of reasons). So I was debating my evangelical friends about it. Why, I asked them, does God care so much about what we believe? Why doesn't he care as much about what we actually do? It was an interesting debate, but I don't want to discuss Christian theology in this post. What I want to talk about here is the relative importance of belief versus actions, not in a religious sense (because I'm not religious), but in the context of a secular ethics that doesn't require belief in the supernatural. Contrary to what the Mike Huckabees and James Dobsons of the world will have you believe, religion has no monopoly on morality.

My debates with my Christian friends put the issue of belief/action into sharper focus for me. I was asking them why belief itself is so important, but then I thought: Wait a minute...I think belief is important too! I'm always railing against the kind of relativism that says reality is socially constructed, and therefore truth is relative to one's culture. Sure, some things (money, national borders, etc.) are socially constructed, but not everything is. I think there is an objective reality, that it was around for billions of years before humans were, and that it's important for our beliefs to match that reality as well as possible.

But why is it important? Why do beliefs matter? Well, I've always maintained that they matter because we act on them. It matters whether you believe, for example, that animals are automatons who can't feel pain and suffering. If you believe that, you'll be more likely to treat them as such--leaving them out in the rain on a cold night, for example. If that belief is factually wrong (and I'm pretty sure it is) then your actions will be ethically wrong, because you'll be causing them suffering.

But while debating with my friends, I realized that if beliefs matter because of how people act on them, then actions, not beliefs, are doing the moral heavy lifting. Action is where belief runs into morality, isn't it? How can a belief you don't act on have a moral consequence? These questions bring me up short, because my knee-jerk attitude is that correct belief is important whether it has ethical consequences or not. I want to understand this world I find myself in as best I can, and to the extent that my beliefs are wrong, I have failed. If I went along with a some of my more New Agey friends and believed in astrology, and if that belief never had any ethical impact (which is unlikely) does that mean it's OK to believe in astrology? Lord, no! Because it's not true, doggonit! Why go through life thinking something that's not true, if you can help it?

Still, I have to admit that it's much more important to be right about beliefs with moral implications than those without them. If I told you that a hummingbird is a direct descendant of a dinosaur--that it IS a dinosaur, in strict phylogenetic terms--I'd be telling you the mainstream scientific theory of the origin of birds. Most dinosaurs went extinct, and the rest evolved into birds. But if you look at that hummingbird and say, "Dinosaurs?! No way!", it won't be the end of the world. You'll probably be an equally good person whether you believe it or not.

All these questions reminded me of the viral image at the top of this post, which I had seen making the rounds on the internet a few weeks before my debate over heaven, hell, and belief. I decided to get more of my friends' input on the whole question, so I posted the picture on Facebook, and asked: True or false? When I first saw the picture, I thought, "Wow, that's a good point". I even felt a little chastened, because I certainly do more thinking than charitable volunteering.  But not everyone agreed with me. One friend said "False", maintaining that "if you do the right thing for the wrong reason you're not being a good person". Another friend agreed, saying that if a racist and a non-racist act exactly the same way, the non-racist is still a better person. These seem like valid points to me, and I might not have thought about them otherwise (which is one reason I think dialogue is so important, but that's another blog post).

Another friend said the statement was false because your beliefs are what determine your actions. That's a good point, too, but it's not always true. For example, I truly think I would be a better person if I didn't eat meat, especially from animals raised inhumanely, like the chickens I see crammed into cages on trucks going down the interstate. But I love meat, and I hate to cook, and I go on eating meat at fast food joints. Yes, I set up an automatic withdrawal to donate a few bucks to the Humane Society every month, in the hope that they will work to make factory farming more humane, but I still eat those chicken sandwiches, with a small side order of guilt every time.  I'm NOT acting on my beliefs, and I don't act on them several times a week. So, it's true that beliefs are important, but it's not true that right beliefs necessarily lead to right actions, and that's really the whole point of the words on the chalkboard.

Another friend made an excellent point, which is worth quoting in full:  "I think perhaps it's worded wrongly to make what I assume is the intended point. It should say something like "beliefs themselves aren't enough to make you a better person. Behavior / action is required as well." I.E. you can believe we need to care for the homeless all day long, but actually have to donate to / volunteer at the soup kitchen for those beliefs to matter." This highlights a big problem I've noticed in our soundbite age: catchy slogans aren't subtle enough to capture the complexity of reality, but subtle, thoughtful statements, alas, rarely go viral (this might explain a whole lot about our world, and I'm not just talking about the internet era). Of course, her main point is that the words on the chalkboard present a false dichotomy. Both belief and action are important, especially since beliefs determine actions so much of the time. But the point of the picture is still a good one, and I'm glad it made the rounds. You can believe all day that poverty is awful, but that won't do anything unless you actually get up and try to do something to help.

So, am I actually volunteering at a soup kitchen? No. I'm sitting here writing, trying to work out what I believe, instead of getting off my butt and making myself useful. I tend to indulge my cerebral self, spending a lot of my free time reading and writing about life's questions, big and little. And to some extent, I think that's justified, because beliefs and ideas really do matter. People act on their ideas, so it's important to spend some time thinking about what you're going to act on.  Since that's true, thinking and writing can be valuable actions, because it can influence not only how you act, but how others act. Ideas aren't just powerful because they can influence one person's actions. Ideas spread and multiply, so one person can have an idea that can spread throughout the world, and cause a lot of good or a lot of bad. I've never had one of those ideas myself, but you never know, and besides, if I can gain a few insights this way, and perhaps encourage other people to have even better insights, or question potentially harmful beliefs, that's worthwhile. (That's an important point for this discussion, actually. When it comes to beliefs that cause harmful actions, the actions are the most important thing, but in a negative way. It would be better not to act on those beliefs).

Still, I probably spend too much time thinking, and not enough time doing. I've always liked the Buddhist parable where people are asking the Buddha metaphysical questions of the sort he had little time for: "Is the world infinite or finite? Does the soul exist after death?" He told them they were like a man who has been shot with a poisoned arrow. Before letting anyone remove it, the man wants to know who shot him, what family his assailant came from, what kind of poison is on the arrow, and so on. By the time he answers all these questions, he'll be dead. What he needs to do right now is forget about them, and yank that arrow out.

It's a good point. Endless speculation about unanswerable questions won't make the world a better place. Of course, some unanswerable questions become answerable if you keep at them long enough. "What is the sun made of?" was once unanswerable, but eventually it was answered (by science, it should be pointed out, not philosophy or religion). Still, speculation can only get you so far. Belief can only get you so far, even if you know for a fact that you're right. What makes ideas and beliefs matter most is the impact they actually have. I don't always remember this, but I should try to. And then I should try to do something about it.