The Lord God Made Them...All?

Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks 1834

I've always loved James Herriot's books about his life as a Yorkshire veterinarian. That was pretty much inevitable, since I'm the son of an English teacher and a rural veterinarian. The books are full of comical but kind-hearted stories about eccentric creatures and their even more eccentric owners, and they're pretty much delightful all the way through. If you find yourself in a bad mood, Dr. Herriot offers good medicine.

The title of one of his books, which is often used as the title of the whole set, is All Creatures Great and Small. This comes from the second line of an Anglican hymn called Maker of Heaven and Earth, written by Ms. Cecil Frances Alexander in the 1840's. Its first verse goes:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

Once Herriot had used the second line, it was a no-brainer to use the other three for the titles of later books. I always liked those four lines. They really do fit the books perfectly, with their unabashed innocence and reverence. They don't match the more cynical, ironic aesthetic you find these days at all, but that's fine with me. 

But the rest of the hymn, it turns out, isn't as charming. Besides getting a bit too cutesy, it also includes this uncomfortable little verse: 

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Yikes.

That's not the only part of the hymn I can't agree with, though. As much as I like the first verse, I don't think the Lord God really made them all, any more than I think he made the 19th century English class system. Science has made it clear that all the animals on earth, as well as all the plants, fungi, diatoms, bacteria, etc, were shaped by evolution, not God. If there is a God, maybe he set the whole thing in motion, but even if the theory of evolution had never been formulated, I still wouldn't believe God could have crafted each of the living things on earth himself. Not if God is good, as most theists think he is.

Because the thing is, all things aren't bright and beautiful, much less wise and wonderful. Some creatures are really just horrid. I learned this at an early age, because as I said, my dad is a veterinarian. For as long as I can remember, he's had a jar in his office with a dog's heart in formaldehyde. The dog was killed by the heartworms that are still packed into its heart like a fistfull of vermicelli. Dad brings it out to show people why they need to get their dog on heartworm prevention medicine. It works. He's also got a jar of sheep bot fly larvae, and the less said about their life cycle, the better. Suffice it say you don't want to be a sheep.

When people wax eloquent about how God crafted all creatures great and small, they don't usually have heartworms or bot flies in mind. They talk about lambs, or hummingbirds, or whales...the beautiful people of the animal kingdom. But really, those who believe there's a God, and that he is good, might want to think twice about crediting him with some of the other creatures. Did God create the heartworm as well as the lamb? Did he create the bot fly that lays its eggs in that lamb's nose (sorry, TMI). Did he create the brain-eating amoeba and the bubonic plague...or the fleas that carried it...or the rats that carried them? Did he devise the lifecycle of the parasitic wasps I discussed in my last post? Did he teach the little cuckoos, laid in another bird's nest, to hatch early and push the rightful eggs over the edge? Do we really want to chalk those things up to God? 

The irreverent geniuses of Monty Python made the same point, lampooning Ms. Alexander's optimistic little hymn with their version; All Things Dull and Ugly, which begins:

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot 

Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings

Now, some may think I'm doing a sort of reverse cherry-picking, by choosing some especially yucky creatures to talk about. Surely those are in the minority? Well, no. Most people think parasites are on the yucky side of creation, and if you include bacteria and viruses in the definition of "parasite", then parasites may outnumber "free-living species" four to one. Parasites strike us as especially uncalled for, but they aren't the only source of nastiness in the living world. Male ducks, for example, practice something euphemistically known as "forced copulation". Among mammals, infanticide is rampant. There are snakes that lie in wait in nests, and welcome hatching babies into the world by eating them. They've been doing this since the hatchlings were dinosaurs. Most species on earth either eat, or are eaten by, other species. Many do both, of course (though they tend to have the second experience only once). 

If God is good, and God made the natural world--designing each organism in its turn--why is there so much pain and strife in nature? If you're going to credit a supernatural creator, Satan seems like a better candidate than God for some of what goes on out there. Doesn't Old Scratch seem more likely, for example, to have arranged for baby sharks to eat each other in the womb? That has his stamp all over it. As Darwin himself said, "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!"

You can believe that God is good, or you can believe that He created every species personally, but I don't see how you can believe both at the same time. This leads to a surprising thought. If you want to keep believing God is good, it actually makes more sense to believe living species were created by a blind, amoral process of natural selection than individually by God. Natural selection is where all the evidence points, anyway, and it doesn't put us in the position of trying to explain why God made the liver fluke and the Guinea worm. Or, for that matter, why Satan did. The idea that those things evolved by blind natural processes may not be especially uplifting, but it's not as depressing as thinking they were created by a vengeful God or the evil king of the underworld.

But enough about the nastiness of the living world. It is an undeniable fact, but there's a lot more to nature than that. As shocked as Darwin was by waste and cruelty in nature, he also found nature awe-inspiring. This is apparent in these beautiful and oft-quoted concluding lines of The Origin of Species: 

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

In later editions of the book, Darwin actually changed the text to say "breathed by the Creator." I'm not sure whether he believed this, or if it was meant to make the idea more palatable to the public. Darwin himself seems to have been an agnostic later in life. Whatever the implications of his theory for religion, Darwin was right about evolution, and I think he was also right about nature's grandeur. It really is full of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful". Nature may be amoral, but it's astonishingly creative; inventive beyond all human imagining. Some of those creations are beautiful, and some are awful, but all of them are amazing in one way or another.

From salt-loving bacteria in boiling volcanic pools, to horned narwals navigating though arctic ice, the variety of life is stunning. This world has seen dragonflies the size of crows and giant ground sloths the size of elephants. There are fish that fly and birds that swim; flowers that mimic insects and insects that mimic flowers. In the Rocky Mountains there are aspen groves--single organisms connected at the roots--covering dozens of acres and living for tens of thousands of years. You could study the living world all your life and never run out of wonders to marvel at. The Lord God didn't make them all (and that should be good news for people of faith), but that doesn't mean the world can't be bright and beautiful.

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Do Parasites Rule the World? / Carl Zimmer

I discovered Monty Python's version of the hymn, and Darwin's remarks about a devil's chaplain, in Richard Dawkins' excellent book The Greatest Show On Earth.

Captain Stormfield and the Sky-Blue Man

Last night I re-read Mark Twain's hilarious little novella, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. I first read it as a kid when my Mom gave it to me, telling me it had changed the way she thought about some of life's big questions. It had the same effect on me.

"Well, when I had been dead about thirty years," the story begins, "I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, I had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet." The good captain is on his way to heaven, but space is a big place, and though he estimates he's making a good million miles a minute, it's a long way. He's a boisterous old soul, and he gets a little bored, so he decides to race a comet. This takes him off course, and when he arrives at the gates of heaven, he's come to the wrong one. After waiting in line with "a sky-blue man with seven heads and only one leg", he finds that the attendent has never even heard of Earth. It turns out that beings from billions of other worlds also go to heaven, and the Earth is not one of the more prominent worlds. The attendents eventually figure out where he's from, and send him on his way, where more surprises await him.

As a kid, I was fascinated by the idea that God might have created other inhabited worlds besides our own. That kind of stupendous cosmic creator sounded a lot more God-like to me than the descriptions I heard in Sunday school. And it still does, though these days I don't claim to know if there's a God or not. If there is, I certainly don't think he created humans in his image. Our species has no business being that egotistical. But I can imagine him (or her) creating the universe knowing that intelligent life would eventually evolve on some worlds, or at least this one. I can also imagine that he didn't, but it's interesting to think about what follows if he did.

And no, I'm not going to turn this into an argument that God doesn't exist. I really am interested in thinking about what's likely to be true if he does. Let's assume for the sake of argument that God intentionally created a universe with intelligent life (and further assume we qualify as such). Now let's combine that assumption with a certainty: the unfathomable enormity of space. We share our galaxy with at least a hundred billion stars--more stars than you could count in a lifetime; many with planets circling them. And our galaxy is just one of countless others, some of which are behemoths containing over a trillion stars. I can't help thinking there's life out there in all that, even if life is completely random (which I think is likely). But I don't really know. However, if God intentionally created a universe with intelligent life, then I would think there really is life on billions of worlds.

That may seem like a surprising conclusion, and it doesn't seem to be common among theists. But why else would God have created all those galaxies, stars, and planets? If he created our world with some purpose in mind (and most theists think he did) then why would he have created all that extra space, if not to put life out there, too? Most just think of God as focusing on the creation of the earth, and humans in particular. But if that were his focus, why did he make all those other galaxies? Of course, I have no idea what's necessary when creating a universe, but still, making all that just to stick life on one little out-of-the way speck of dust--seems like a strange extravagance.

I guess what's fascinating to me about this idea is that I see most religious views of creation as far too small. The idea that God created this world all at once a few thousand years ago just seems so pedestrian next to the thought that it's millions of years older than that. It's like comparing a sand castle and the Great Pyramid. The literalist view of creation just doesn't do justice to the grandeur of the universe. Nature is more magnificent than that. But if my line of thought in this post makes sense, then a religious view of a purposeful creation should lead to an even more surprising view of the cosmos than a non-religious one. If the universe is random, then maybe living things on Earth are alone in the universe. I doubt it, but we don't have much of a basis for ruling one way or the other. But if life in the universe is purposeful, then we have good reason to think it's common. Unless you want to insist that God flung galaxies across space like so many billion grains of sand, just to put us on this one little particle, in one little atom, in one single grain. And what kind of sense would that make?

School-Sponsored Prayer: What's the Harm?

Last night I didn't feel like reading, especially not the geeky books I usually read. But there wasn't much else to do. So I watched a geeky video. It was an old Bill Moyers interview, from 1987, called God and the Constitution. Moyers talks to Dr. Martin Marty, a Christian and an expert on the religious views of the founders, and Leonard Levy, a Jewish constitutional scholar who edited The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. All three men are stunningly smart, and I urge everyone to watch it (you can stream it for 3 bucks on Amazon.com, or watch it for free if you have a library card and your local library has Access Video on Demand).

The part that struck me the most was Dr. Levy talking about school-sponsored prayer. (Not voluntary student prayer, which is protected by the First Amendent. I want to make clear nobody is saying kids shouldn't be allowed to pray on their own at school.) Levy offers one of the most powerful and personal arguments I've ever heard for keeping official prayers out of schools. It's more impressive if you watch the video, but here's the transcript:

Moyers: What about school prayer?  

Levy: I think that the state should not promote or sponsor religion.  

Moyers: But there are prayers and "prayers." You grew up in De Kalb, Illinois, right?  

Levy: I did.  

Moyers: 20 Years ago in De Kalb the court said the cookie prayer was unconstitutional.  

Levy: I forgot that it came out of De Kalb!  

Moyers: "We thank you for the flowers so sweet, we thank you for the food we eat, we thank you for the birds that sing we thank you, God, for everything." The court declared it unconstitutional even though the teacher took out the word "God".  

Levy: She did, but the court didn't quite declare it unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court won't agree to review a case, they allow the lower court decision to stand. If that's how you construe it--which is reasonable--yes, the court, in effect, upheld that.  

Moyers: Now, do you think the founding fathers would have thought that little verse an establishment of religion?  

Levy: I think not, but... to begin with, that's a prayer being said in the public school. The founding fathers had no position with respect to this because public schools as we know them did not exist. Prayers do not belong in public schools even though they are sterilized, as in the cookie prayer which is non-denominational, and doesn't even refer to God. I agree with you that religious liberty would not be imperiled if children said the cookie prayer in the public schools.  

Moyers: The teacher said she was only trying to instill a sense of wonder in the children--to make them appreciative of the world around them and of the divine being that made that world. She wasn't trying to persuade or to indoctrinate them.  

Levy: These cases are very complex. That's why the court divides so closely and so frequently. When you say that that teacher wanted to inspire children with a sense of wonderment and you referred to her talking about a supreme being, that is a religious statement. You and I may believe it but there are people who don't believe it. 

Moyers: You think the First Amendment protects atheists?  

Levy: Of course it does! The First Amendment protects religion and non-religion. There are people who are not theists who are in our public schools by the thousands. There are people who are not Christians or Jews or Muslims and they ought not be exposed to that cookie prayer which alludes to a divine being who allegedly created the world. You think so and I think so, but there are people who don't think so and they shouldn't be made to feel like outsiders, as if they don't belong, as if this is not their country. It's their country as much as it is ours. 

Moyers: If I remember correctly you refused to take part in prayers in De Kalb, Illinois, when you were a boy there--1935, 1936. What happened when you said "I can't participate in that prayer."  

Levy: What happened? Well, I was ostracized. No, more than that--I was persecuted. They beat me up regularly as I went home from school. Gangs of kids would jump out and beat the hell out of me and call me a "Jew bastard" and "Christ killer." I loved to play softball, and I was kept off the team. "No kikes on our team," was the motto which had, by the way, some sponsorship from the faculty. When religion is introduced directly into the public schools there is a price that may very well be paid by people who are different. There have often been times when persecution was visited upon children who wouldn't participate in the public school rituals of religion.

Powerful stuff. Of course, the thirties were a very different time, and I don't think that kind of thing would happen to Jewish kids these days. At least not as commonly and openly. But kids can be very cruel when they decide to single out another kid, mobbing them like a bunch of crows. And I can certainly imagine them abusing a Hindu or Sikh kid, or especially a Muslim or atheist kid, for declining to participate in Christian prayers. Even if they didn't (and most often they wouldn't), that kid would be put in a very, very uncomfortable situation. Now, some people will say that this doesn't apply in overwhelmingly Christian areas. But it does. I'm from a small, white, Protestant town smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, but there were a handful of Hindu and Muslim kids even there, and probably more than a handful of non-religious kids. The Hindu and Muslim kids were younger than me, and I don't know if they were ever harassed because of their religion. If so, I would think it was probably minor. But I might be wrong, and I'm pretty sure they would have had a tougher time if they had been put in the position of deciding whether or not to say prayers along with the Christian kids. That could have opened up a can of worms. So why open it? Leaving official prayer and other religious observances out of school keeps the problem from ever arising, or at least from arising because of school policy. And besides, Dr. Levy is right. It's their country, too.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: It's for People, not Beliefs

"Test everything, hold fast to what is good" - 1 Thessalonians 5 21-22

Douglas Adams, hilariously hyperbolic humorist and author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, once attended a conference called Digital Biota 2, where he stood up and gave a impromptu, rambling, and altogether brilliant talk. People still read and quote it today, years after his death.

One of the topics he covers is the way people tiptoe around other people's religious beliefs:

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'.

He goes on to say:

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise - that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think 'Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity', what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so?

This question has been nagging at me lately. I absolutely agree with him that the best way to find the truth is to test and question every idea. Whatever ideas can survive the questioning are the ones most likely to be true or useful. But if questioning is essential, how do we approach religion? Religious people can be very attached to traditional religious answers to big, important questions like, "Where do we come from", or "How should we act?" Those who question those ideas can face a backlash. Once they were burned at the stake, and they still face violent reprisals and arrest in many parts of the world. Such backlash is just one reason people avoid questioning religion, but it's a pretty compelling one.

These days, it's not just Christianity that gets this kind of deference. Lots of secular liberals have a knee-jerk respect for most of the world's religions. That comes from an admirable impulse to avoid ethnocentrism, but it can be problematic, too. A while back, for example, I was reading about how Bob Marley died. He had found a melanoma on his toe, but when doctors advised him to have it amputated, he refused, saying it was contrary to his Rastafarian beliefs. He died of cancer at the age of 36. People praise him for being brave enough to stick to his beliefs in the face of death. I even had the same reaction at first. And then I thought, "Well, yeah, it was brave, but it was also a tragic waste of a brilliant life." If he had stopped to question why it should be taboo to amputate a cancerous toe, he might have stayed alive these last 32 years.

When people react to such stories with approval, rather than sadness, it shows that they're respecting people's beliefs more than their actual lives. And that's perverse. Beliefs have no feelings, no hopes, no family...people do. Beliefs aren't the kind of entities that deserve dignity and respect. People are. Life is precious, not belief.

When so many beliefs in this world are both wrong and harmful, being deferential to them is a luxury we can't afford, and that includes religious beliefs. But that doesn't mean we should start ridiculing religion willy-nilly, the way a lot of people in the secular humanist/atheist/skeptic movement do these days. There's no reason you can't question somebody's religious beliefs politely (unless questioning them at all is considered impolite, and that's what needs to be changed). Questioning is essential for all ideas, not just religious ones. But it can be done considerately: by trying to understand and respect people's feelings...and remembering they have every right to question your beliefs, too. Fair is fair.

But having a frank, respectful discussion of religion can be especially tricky. One thing secular types like Douglas Adams and myself forget is that religious people see the things they believe in as real and deserving of respect--even worship. To a secular person, God is an abstract idea. To a believer, God is the supreme creator and ruler of the universe, who loves them and watches over them. They may see any questioning of God or other sacred things, like sacred texts and rituals, as disrepectful to God; as sacrilege or blasphemy. Secular people have a hard time understanding blasphemy: how can an abstract idea be insulted? But to religious people, that abstract idea is very real. Maybe they're even right. But if the ideas that can survive our questioning are the ones that are true, and God is a real, all-knowing, all-powerful being, then he should have no trouble weathering our puny little human questions.

Ideas have to be questioned. It's the only way to figure out which ones are true. Such questioning might be the chief engine of human progress (a twin engine is compassion). But we can do our questioning with respect--not for the ideas themselves, but for the people who hold them. One reason to be respectful is simply practical: if you want someone to seriously consider what you're saying, the last thing you want to do is offend them. Sometimes you truly can't help offending people, but the less you do, the more likely they are to listen. The other reason to be respectful is that most people--religious and otherwise--really do deserve respect. When I think about the people I admire most in this world, some of them are atheists, and some of them are devoutly religious. I know truly great people in both camps, and at many points in between. I know people on both sides whose compassion and selflessness I find awe-inspiring. When I write this, I hope some of the religious people I admire will read it, too, so I'm trying to show them the respect they deserve.

I don't always succeed, of course. I get mad and scathing. I forget that the point of having a discussion is to get at the truth, not to win the argument or show off my debating skills. I let my ego get in the way of productive debate, and try to back people into embarrassing logical corners. Then I feel bad about it later, unless they're absolute jackasses, and then I really don't. Maybe I should anyway. I'm only human, though, and I still have a lot to learn from wiser people than myself--religious and otherwise.

My point is that we need to change how we conceptualize respect for other people's opinions. Maybe true respect is best shown by having an honest, civil discussion, with no taboo topics. After all, are you really respecting someone's intellect when there are topics you avoid, for fear of giving offense? I don't think so. I think polite honesty can be more more respectful than deferential silence. Besides, as I've been saying, beliefs don't deserve respect. People do, and that's why it's possible to question a person's beliefs while respecting them as a person. In fact, it's not just possible. It's essential. There's not much hope for humanity if we stop questioning old beliefs and looking for better ones. But there's also not much hope if we forget to treat each other with respect.
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http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

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.

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.

Of God and other Mysteries

Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

It's dangerous for someone like me to work in a library.  Sometimes I feel like a compulsive gambler working in a casino.  I get sucked in, taking home way too many books, and thinking about the big questions of existence more than, you know, doing laundry and going to the grocery store.  The other day I was arranging the books in the religion section, and noticed all the books about God. There were biographies of God, histories of God, books by scientists about how the idea of God is compatible with science, and books by other scientists about how it isn't.  I think about religion quite a bit, but that's mostly because religious extremism scares the crap out of me.  I haven't thought much in recent years about religion as it relates to me, because I'm one of those people who thinks you can be a happy, decent person without it.  But--and I guess this is another reason I think about religion a lot--it bothers me when I interact with religious people, often people I like, and then think about how they have a fundamentally different view of....well...fundamental reality than I do.  Someone who literally believes in the prophecies of Revelation, and someone like me who doesn't really believe in a supernatural at all; we're really living in two different worlds. Anyway, I started looking at those books about God, and decided to read some of them, to try to figure out what people actually mean when they talk about God.

Because I really didn't know.  When many people talk about God, they seem to envision some kind of heavenly father up in the sky, looking down on them and taking an active role in their lives.  Others see God as a more distant, ineffable entity; as the "ground of being", or the "first cause", or "ultimate reality".  I know people with both these views of God, and all kinds of variations in between.  So, when I hear people talking about God, I have this big, foggy question mark in my head.  "What do you mean when you say that?" I think.

Anyway, for the last 3 weeks or so I've been pondering two questions more than usual: 1. What are the most common conceptions of God? 2. Is there any concept of God that I, with my basically scientific, naturalistic view of the universe, could actually imagine existing? At the risk of killing the heart-pounding suspense of this post, I didn't satisfactorily answer either question.  I'm still confused by what people mean when they talk about God, and thinking about what kind of God I could see as plausible has left me with a terrible existential headache.  It didn't take me long to run into puzzles that leave the world's great intellects scratching their heads, and therefore leave me entirely slackjawed.  So, I'm not going to try to do some in-depth analysis of the issues in this post.  There are things I feel like I can discuss with some degree of confidence, and this is not one of them.  So I'm going to ramble, and just mention some ideas I've come across. If this post seems a little half-baked, that's because my ideas on this stuff ARE half-baked. I doubt anyone will, but please don't change what you think based on this amateurish screed.  If you follow up on some of these ideas and read people who really know what they're talking about, and then change your mind, that's different.

First, any concept of God I could believe in, or at least entertain seriously, would NOT be much like the God you find in Bible, who prefers one ethnic group over another, changes his mind, is jealous of other Gods, and so on.  The God in most of the Old Testament, and parts of the New Testament (and I have read them, though it's been a while,) seems closer to the kind of god most people these days see as pure mythology, like Zeus, Aries, or Odin.  Of course, the Old Testament was written when people really tended to believe in those kinds of gods, so this isn't surprising.  I also can't accept the concept of God, or many of the other beliefs, common to most branches of Christianity. If you look at the early statements of belief still accepted by most of them, like the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed, they are full of things that are, for me and many of my peers, hard to swallow.  They affirm that Jesus was born of a virgin, died to atone for our sins (atonement being required so that God wouldn't send us all to hell for eternity), was resurrected from the dead, descended into heaven, rules at the right hand of God, and will come back someday to judge the living and the dead.  The Apostle's Creed says Jesus descended into hell.  Both talk about the resurrection of the dead, and the Apostle's Creed actually talks about the resurrection of the body--for most Christian denominations (though their members may not realize it) the standard historical belief, as set forth in the Apostle's Creed and other places, is that the dead will literally rise from their graves when Jesus returns.  Look it up.

I'm sorry, but all these things seems like ancient, pre-scientific mythology to me.  I don't say that to insult people who believe them; it's just what I think.  What also seems completely unbelievable is the idea of a three-part God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are of the same being but somehow distinct. This just seems made up to me, and no more believable than any of hundreds of other ideas of God that people around the world have had. Why should I believe this particular one...because I was raised in a predominantly Christian country? I don't find that convincing. The argument that, "I grew up thinking X, therefore X is true" just doesn't seem like good reasoning to me.  For one thing, anyone could make that argument, no matter what their beliefs (and they do).  Unless you believe truth is nothing but a social construction (and I don't) then if these beliefs contradict each other, they can't all be right.

But even the more subtle ideas about God run into problems.  Many people describe God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all good.  But those things can lead to contradictory conclusions. For example, is God so all-powerful that he can sidestep logic? School kids ask if God can make a rock so big he can't lift it.  Well, they've got a point. And then there's the problem of evil.  If God is all good, why is there so much awfulness in the world? If God is both all-powerful and all-good, why didn't he, for example, stop the Holocaust, or the tsunamis in Japan and the Indian Ocean? As for human evil, people argue that God gave us free will, and that some people took that freedom and used it for evil purposes.  Well maybe, but free will is another one of those great unsolved mysteries, so I'm not sure. Besides, if God is all-knowing, can we really be free? If he already knows what we are going to do, is that really freedom? And why did he give us so much freedom to be evil anyway? I can see a benevolent God making a cosmic rule that an individual should have the freedom to hang himself with his own rope, but what is served by allowing a Hitler or a Pol Pot? (For that matter, if God can and does intervene in human affairs, why doesn't he just unambiguously show himself, in a way that convinces all reasonable people? That would solve a lot of confusion.)

Also, if God is all-good and all-powerful, why did he create, or allow to be created, a hell where people are tortured for all eternity? (I'm speaking rhetorically; I don't believe in hell).  As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, you can't even argue that hell is for correction, because there's no escape--it's for eternity.  You're never going to think, "I'll be good now, I don't want to go back there!"  The ideas of a good God and of hell are simply mutually exclusive as far as I'm concerned. I can't imagine a (good) God saying that if I ask for evidence for his existence (or his Son's) instead of taking it on faith, I will go to hell.  Surely, if there is a God worth venerating, he wants us to use our reasoning powers? And surely no good God would decide that, ever since Adam ate the fruit, humans have been so tainted by this original sin that only the death--by torture--of his son would keep us from spending all eternity being tortured by demons? I've said it before, but I think that idea--that we are all born deserving to be tortured forever--is surely the worst idea anyone ever had. And once again, why should I believe it any more than I should believe in Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Islam...or atheism, for that matter? Because I'd better if I don't want to go to hell? That's just existential blackmail, and I can't imagine a decent God blackmailing us like that.

As for other arguments for the existence of God, we all know William Paley's argument from design: that surely all the intricate complexity of life on Earth proves that it was designed by an unimaginable intelligence?  Paley had an excellent point...at the time.  There was no other reasonable explanation, until Darwin came along.  Evolution by natural selection, combined with enormous stretches of time, really can account for the complexity of life on Earth.  Even the things people have pointed to and said, "That couldn't have just evolved, it's too complex" have been shown to be easily create-able by evolution.  The eye, for example, has evolved many times, and different creatures have eyes that display the whole range of eye-complexity, from light-detecting eyespots to the amazing camera-like eyes of humans, eagles, or octopuses.  The flagellar motor, beloved of intelligent design theorists, is also quite easily explained by evolution, and does have known precursors.

Besides, if God really designed life as-is, we could reasonably ask about some of his design choices.  Why, for example, does the male urethra pass directly through the prostate gland, which is prone to swelling and blocking things up? Why are the majority of non-photosynthetic species on earth parasites? Is that really how God would have wanted it? Why don't all those animals without hands have some way to remove ticks, fleas, and mites, which can sometimes get bad enough to kill them? Life on earth is astoundingly complex, and often beautiful, but can be horrible often enough to make me question the idea that an all-good God designed it, even if I had never heard of Darwin.

There are also problems with God as the creator of the universe: the "prime mover" or "un-caused cause".  People say that if everything has a cause, then if we trace things back far enough, we must surely find a first cause.  That cause, they say, is God. Well, why does it have to be God? Why should a first cause resemble the Judeo-Christian God?  And besides, what caused God? Did he cause himself? Maybe he did, but I would really like to know how that works.  Really, as Richard Dawkins and others have pointed out, it's more parsimonious to suggest that the universe evolved from a simple state than to say it was created by God, because surely a God capable of creating a universe is more complex than the universe itself, at least initially? If we want to keep invoking Occam's Razor--preferring the simplest explanation possible--then the idea of a God creating the universe doesn't really get us there.  And it still leaves the question of where God came from, and why the ultimate cause should be something we would recognize as a God.  Still, I recently saw it pointed out that not all true explanations of the world conform to Occam's Razor.  The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum points out that Thales said that all matter is made of water. That's a nice, simple theory that conforms nicely to Occam's Razor, but reality is more complex: matter is made of over 100 different chemical elements. Of course, those are made of a smaller number of elementary particles, but the point is still a good one.

So, could it be that our universe, at least originally, was designed by some hyper-intelligent, complex being who set it all in motion at the time of the Big Bang?  Right now, we're at a point with that question somewhat similar to someone pondering life before Darwin came along.  Because there is something weird about the universe.  Respectable physicists talk about the Anthropic Principle, the idea that any explanation of how the cosmos works must be compatible with the fact that we exist.  At first, that sounds pretty trivial: if someone proposes a theory of, for example, how oxygen atoms form inside stars, that theory can't be true if it means that the universe would have turned out different than it actually is.  Another way of saying it is that we could only exist in a universe in which our existence is possible.  These statements are ways of describing what's known as the Weak Anthropic Principle (I hate the word "anthropic"--"Complex Life Principle" would be much better, and less...Ptolemaic).  The weak anthropic principle is more or less a tautology. Of course we exist in a universe in which it's possible to exist! But what keeps the idea from being trivial is that scientists actually have used it to constrain their theories: the theory has to predict results compatible with a universe in which complex life could exist, because, well...here we are.

But there's also a more arresting and controversial version of the anthropic principle, called the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the the universe seems to be in some sense fine-tuned for complex life to emerge in it.  And in fact, if you changed the numbers of some physical constants just a little bit, life would be impossible.  Not only that, but the universe as we know it would be impossible. If the four fundamental forces of nature--gravity, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and the electromagnetic forces--had slightly different values, we wouldn't be here. For example, the electromagnetic force is enormously stronger than gravity--many, many zeros stronger.  If gravity were a little stronger, the universe would have all collapsed back together again after the Big Bang. And we wouldn't be here. I'm not going to go into all the ways in which the universe had to be just so in order for complex life to emerge. You can google "Anthropic Principle" and find much better explanations than mine. Suffice it to say there are many examples.

Now, this might also seem trivial if you compare this idea to another one: that Earth seems so well-designed for life.  Earth is just the right distance from the sun, and has the right amount of carbon, oxygen, etc., to support life.  Well, sure it does, because we evolved on it.  It's not so much that the earth fits life as life fits the earth.  Of course there are many imaginable worlds (and many actually-discovered planets) where life remotely resembling Earth's would be impossible.  But it's not a big coincidence that there are planets in the universe hospitable to life, since there are apparently countless planets in the universe.  Of course we live on one of the ones hospitable to life, and of course it seems perfectly suited for life, since life evolved to fit it. There's absolutely no reason to think the earth was specially created for life.  Thinking otherwise would be to think like the puddle in Douglas Adams' wonderful quote: "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"

Now, why isn't the apparent fine-tuning of the universe just another example of this "puddle thinking"? Maybe it is, but it's not as simple as the case of the earth. The reason is that we're talking about things that describe the entire observable universe, not just one of many planets.  Why do we find ourselves in this particular universe, which really does seem to be far more hospitable to life than it has any reason to be? There really does seem to be something that needs explained here, though some people obviously disagree.  Several answers have been proposed.  One idea is that the universe was designed this way, perhaps by some sort of inconceivably superior being, and that life was basically part of the recipe, if not the initial ingredients. If there is only one universe, then that idea seems about as plausible to me as any other. Another idea is that it's just an enormous coincidence that the universe has the characteristics it does: yes, it's incredibly unlikely, but some coincidences happen, right?  Yes, they do, but I honestly don't see how that's much more plausible than the designer scenario.  We're talking about a gigantic coincidence here.  It would be like if only one person were allowed to pick from millions of lottery tickets, and she picked the winning ticket.

Another idea is that there are actually multiple universes, all with different characteristics.  If there are countless universes, then it's not surprising that one of them will happen to be hospitable to life, and obviously, that is the one we will find ourselves in. This is the same as the logic of why the Earth is so hospitable for life, but on a much larger scale.  But here we're back to Occam's Razer: isn't positing an enormous number of universes incredibly unparsimonious? Just as much as positing a designer, even if "he" would have to be more complex than the universe he designed? I don't know, since I don't know what a designer would be like. But I do know that there are scientific grounds for speculating about multiple universes.  According to some theories, the visible universe may be a miniscule part of a larger, possibly infinite universe, which may have different characteristics in different places.  Also, since space and time seem to pinch off into unreachable regions inside black holes, it may be that each black hole creates another universe.  Some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that every time  a quantum particle does one thing instead of another, the universe divides. Seriously, they say that. This sounds crazy, but other interpretations of quantum mechanics are also crazy (though maybe not AS crazy).

Anyway, there are plenty of respectable, if speculative, scientific reasons that our universe could be one of many.  There are also other, even weirder proposals, about how life and consciousness might retroactively cause the universe to come into existence and evolve life (I urge you to read The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies, which brilliantly, and mind-bogglingly, explains all these ideas).  Personally, I do think the weird fine-tuning of the universe needs an explanation, but I think the multiple-universes one is more plausible than the designer one, since it does have precedent on a smaller scale.

But who knows? Maybe there is some sort of cosmic designer who created our universe.  Maybe life is somehow necessary.  Maybe consciousness is even necessary, or preordained? If the kind of God we're talking about is the God depicted in the Bible, who is often violent and petty, then yes, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in him any more than I believe in Marduk or Isis.  But if we're talking about some kind of inconceivably grand cosmic designer, then I think it would be rash to be an atheist. Who am I to say what's out there in other dimensions, or beyond the farthest galaxies? There are still plenty of profound mysteries that we are nowhere near solving: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does mathematics work, and where does it come from? Could it be that information, or logic, is what's really fundamental? I can imagine a universe without matter, but I can't imagine a universe where 2 + 2 = 5. Could some of these unsolved mysteries contain the key to whether there's a God or not?

One of the truly great mysteries, for me, is how consciousness works.  How is it that a certain arrangement of matter--my brain, for example--can feel like something? I can understand (at least in principle) how it can process information, but I can't even begin to imagine how this processing is sometimes accompanied by awe, or pain, or the color red.  I read recently where someone said we're about 5 Einsteins away from explaining why the universe exists at all.  Maybe so, and I think that's about how far we are from explaining consciousness--not self-consciousness, or thinking, but the actual feeling of being awake and alive.  Some people say that this amazement at consciousness is just a kind of mystery-mongering, like a sort of vitalism of the mind. Maybe it is.  But vitalism--the idea that some extra "spark of life" is necessary for life, above and beyond the physical processes of life--seems silly to me.  We may not know everything about life, but it seems perfectly explainable in terms of biochemistry and evolution and other scientific ideas.  We know the basic mechanisms of life, though there are details to be worked out. Consciousness is, I would think, perfectly explainable in terms of some mechanism, too, but we don't know that mechanism yet.  At least I don't think we do.

Some people suggest that consciousness could be a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity: that any time information is processed in a certain way, consciousness arises.  I don't know.  If that's true, could there be something "divine" about consciousness? Could it be a sort of "divine spark" in every conscious thing, as Hasidic Jews and others might suggest? Maybe, maybe not.  Karen Armstrong, the historian of religion, is always saying in her books that God could never be something easily defined in language or other symbols, and that you can only begin to know God (whatever he or she is) through practicing awareness and compassion.  In fact, she says that most of the Bible, and other sacred texts, were never meant to be interpreted literally, and that such fundamentalist literalism is a product of the modern world.  I find that last part pretty hard to believe. True, there have been people interpreting scripture allegorically and mythically ever since it was written down, but many others--probably the majority--have also thought it was literally true all that time.  The Nicene Creed and the Apostle's Creed talk about what Christians believe, and I think they mean that literally, not metaphorically.  But still, maybe she has a point about the practice thing, and that you can attain something that at least feels like "the divine" by widening your awareness, especially if that includes cultivating a sense of compassion for other conscious beings.  I'm not the most compassionate person, but I've certainly experienced awe, and it truly does have a sacred feeling about it.  Maybe if an experience feels truly divine or sacred, it really is "divine" in some sense, whether there's a God in the literal sense of a cosmic supreme being or not. But...but...what if someone gets that feeling from murdering people who don't believe in his God? That's plausible, and definitely argues against the "if it feels sacred, it is" theory.

In any case, consciousness is one of the big mysteries, and those mysteries are the reason I'm an agnostic and not an atheist.  I think we always have to stay humble about what we know, but not so humble we can't rule out clearly outmoded ideas. Yes, the old, anthropomorphic God seems totally implausible to me.  But, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, so maybe some far grander idea of God is plausible.  I think about it this way: In 1900, many physicists thought the basics of physics would soon be a solved problem.  At that time, for all they knew, the universe was pervaded by an invisible ether which light moved through, the Milky Way was the entire universe, and the atom was the smallest unit of matter (if it even existed, which some physicists denied).  In just a few years, they had learned that there is no ether, that space and time are malleable and matter and energy interconvertable, that the atom is made of smaller particles, and that the Milky Way is just one of countless galaxies in a gigantic, expanding universe.  The universe turned out to be far more subtle and astounding than they had ever imagined.  I suspect it will turn out to be far more subtle and astounding than we are imagining today.

There's a lot of mystery still out there.  Is some of that mystery where we might find a God? Many theologians wouldn't like that question.  They call this the "God of the gaps", and they are right to worry.  If we only see the possibility of God in the places where there are mysteries--in the parts of the map labeled "Here Be Dragons"--what happens when we solve more and more mysteries? Does God shrink? Will we find that he doesn't exist, any more than those dragons do? Maybe. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep solving mysteries, and see if we find out, one way or another.  As any decent philosopher will tell you, the fact that an idea has consequences you don't like does not make that idea false.  If the possibility of God shrinks with the gaps in our knowledge, that will be true whether the theologians like it or not.  And, whether they like it or not, there are still mysteries, and I'm not ready to take the leap of faith that would be required to say there isn't some sort of God out there in them. 

But I'm not ready to take the opposite leap of faith either. I figure that if I don't know, what I should believe is: I don't know.  But that doesn't necessarily mean I want to talk you out of your religion.  Some of the more aggressive atheists and humanists argue that all religions are bad, and inevitably lead to violence and debilitating superstition. While I think they commonly lead to those things, I don't think they always do, and they also lead to good things like homeless shelters and hospitals.  Also, I've had people tell me that if they lost their faith in God, they would see no reason to have any sense of morality at all (!).  If they really think that, I hope for all our sakes that they keep right on believing. If people don't have some basic sense of morality to replace religion with, then we're all better off if they stay religious.  But not fundamentalist.  If you believe that the Earth was created in six actual days a few thousand years ago, or that your non-Christian friends are going to burn in hell forever, or that non-Christian lives are less valuable than Christian ones, then yes, I would like to convince you not to believe those things, because they can be very, very harmful.  I won't try to force you not to believe those things, but I will try to convince you.

But if you're a moderate of any religion, I may not agree with you, but I see no reason to hound you about your religious beliefs, as long as you don't try to get them written into law, or make me conform to them some other way.  That doesn't mean I think nothing should be illegal, of course.  Law and morality don't require religion, and laws can and should forbid murder, theft, and so on without appealing to religion.  If you want to impose additional rules on yourself, based on your religion, that's your business.  Basically, if you're not hurting anyone, and you're tolerating me, then I'll tolerate you. We might even be friends.

Richard Dawkins has claimed that moderate religion leaves the door open for religious extremism, because if you think it's OK to belief "moderate" things based on faith instead of evidence (e.g. Jesus was divine), then you could just as well believe extreme things without evidence (e.g. it's OK to burn suspected heretics). It's an interesting point, and while I prefer not to believe things without evidence, I don't think the slope from "moderate" to "extremist" is quite that slippery.  Most decent people are far more skeptical about ideas telling them to hurt people than ideas that don't.  But even if Dawkins is right, moderate religion isn't going away any time soon, and certainly not because some outspoken atheist denounces it. As for me, I'm not going to convert most religious moderates to my way of thinking, and I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway.  If I antagonize them, then they are more likely to see me as the enemy.  I would rather have them as allies, pushing with me against fundamentalism and extremism. Besides, many of them are truly great people, whose selflessness I would do well to emulate.  Some of them may even read this blog, and if you're one of them, and you've made it this far, then hats off to you. I hope I didn't offend.

And I'm still curious about what people mean when they talk about God.  What's your idea of God, if you have one? Tell me in the comments. I'd really like to know.