The Evolution of God

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On Bill Moyers Journal last Friday he talked to Robert Wright, the author of The Evolution of God. It was a very interesting discussion about the book and the nature of God. I wanted to post the video but they had no embedding code so you’ll have to follow the link to watch it. They also have a written transcript, which is how I got these quotes from, so don’t blame any misspellings on me.

BILL MOYERS: So, here's my journalistic lede I would use if I were reviewing your book. "Robert Wright has made a convincing case that if circumstances change, god has changed, because the story of god is intrinsic to the human story. But what Wright has not done is to make a convincing case that god exists."

ROBERT WRIGHT: I would say it's hard for anyone to make a convincing case that god exists in the sense of pointing to evidence. And I don't really try to do that. I mean, I do argue that there is evidence of some sort of larger purpose unfolding through the workings of nature. But that doesn't tell you much about what might have infused the purpose.

Wright says that God was invented by humanity as stories meant to deal the things we could not control and has evolved in many ways, changing to fit the times and the needs of humanity. Personally, I think that is THE argument that tells us there is no god and never was, it was, and continues to be, a human invention. Pretty much ends all argument in my opinion, come back when you have evidence that supports a god as being something other than a made up story. But Wright falls just short of making that claim. He seems to want to walk a line that has him believing in some kind of transcendence but without having to explain what that is.

ROBERT WRIGHT: Because I don't-- what do I mean. I don't--I mean what. Transcendent is a very tricky word. And I get into trouble from hardcore materialists by using it because people think, "Oh, you mean spooky, mystical, ethereal stuff." I don't know exactly what I mean by transcendent.

I may mean beyond our comprehension. I may mean you know, I may mean prior to the creation of the universe or something. I don't know. But I do think that the system on Earth is such that humanity is repeatedly given the choice of either progressing morally in the sense of accepting more people into the moral circle or paying the price of social chaos. Okay?

I recommend watching the video because when you read the above he doesn’t sound very bright, but in the video it comes across very differently and he seems quite intelligent. He fudges the meaning of transcendent in order to give himself wriggle room for not claiming to actually believe anything but without claiming full disbelief. Kind of bizarre, actually. He spends the entire time with Moyers explaining how god is merely a human invention but then tries to deny that he is saying there is no god. Moyers himself is a big god-believer and keeps trying to steer Wright into saying there is a god but Wright just won’t do it.

BILL MOYERS: I don't find any traces of cynicism in the book. In fact, I want to ask you about something you say toward the end. You say that, "Human beings are organic machines that are built by natural selection to deal with other organic machines. They can visualize other organic beings, understand other organic beings, and bestow love and gratitude on other organic beings. Understanding the divine, visualizing the divine, loving the divine--that would be a tall order for a mere human being." But we've not given up trying, have we?

ROBERT WRIGHT: No. And I think, you know, in a way we shouldn't. I mean I think if there is you know, something out there called moral truth. And we should continue to try to relate to it in a way that brings us closer to it. And it--
BILL MOYERS: I don't understand what you mean. Out there?
ROBERT WRIGHT: Well. Well--
BILL MOYERS: What did--
ROBERT WRIGHT: Did I say that?
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, you've said it several times. I mean--
ROBERT WRIGHT: I should be careful.
BILL MOYERS: --if you don't--
ROBERT WRIGHT: Because I don't-- what do I mean. I don't--I mean what. Transcendent is a very tricky word. And I get into trouble from hardcore materialists by using it because people think, "Oh, you mean spooky, mystical, ethereal stuff." I don't know exactly what I mean by transcendent.

Wright continues to say that trying to understand god is not a bad way of trying to align ourselves with some kind of transcendent morality. He uses the example that our morality has also evolved over the centuries, steadily getting better and better, in a sense of including more and more people within our tribe. He seems to be saying our morality keeps improving because we are continually moving closer to some kind of morally that exists out there in the universe.
Keep in mind that Wright wrote The Moral Animal which was all about how natural selection created our morality. He even explains how we can be moving along a pathway to better and better morality because to fail to do so leads to societal chaos. This means we evolve morally because it is in our self interest to do so and those that don’t are less likely to survive their own chaos. This is pretty much the same process of morality evolving through natural selection but Wright seems to not notice this, he keeps trying to attribute this evolution to higher morality as us somehow listening to transcendence, or god, and trying to understand it and get closer to it.
Definitely a blind spot on his part, but the video is worth watching for a very interesting discussion between 2 very interesting men. Maybe I’ll get the book, too.

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New Rules

Great New Rules on Bill Maher last Friday. About evolution and idiot evolution deniers:

"You can’t crap all over Darwin and stem cell research and global warming, then come crawling back to science when you want Tamiflu."

The Law of Evolution

Clive Thompson has an interesting essay on Wired.com. It's about how damn annoying Creationists are when it comes to the word "Theory". I am so sick of hearing someone say "Well, it's ONLY a theory" when talking about evolution. Little do they know tht tells someone who knows about these things that they are completely ignorant on the subject. I've explained over and over what a theory is in science for years now yet it doesn't seem to have made a dent on the terminology.

The defense against this: a revamped scientific lexicon. If the antievolutionists insist on exploiting the public's misunderstanding of words like theory and believe, then we shouldn't fight it. "We need to be a bit less cautious in public when we're talking about scientific conclusions that are generally agreed upon," Quinn says.

What does she suggest? For truly solid-gold, well-established science, let's stop using the word theory entirely. Instead, let's revive much more venerable language and refer to such knowledge as "law." As with Newton's law of gravity, people intuitively understand that a law is a rule that holds true and must be obeyed. The word law conveys precisely the same sense of authority with the public as theory does with scientists, but without the linguistic baggage.

Quinn is physicist Helen Quinn who wrote about this in an essay for Physics Today. Clive goes on to say:

Evolution is supersolid. We even base the vaccine industry on it: When we troop into the doctor's office each winter to get a flu shot — an inoculation against the latest evolved strains of the disease — we're treating evolution as a law. So why not just say "the law of evolution"?

Best of all, it performs a neat bit of linguistic jujitsu. If someone says, "I don't believe in the theory of evolution," they may sound fairly reasonable. But if someone announces, "I don't believe in the law of evolution," they sound insane. It's tantamount to saying, "I don't believe in the law of gravity."

It's time to realize that we're simply never going to school enough of the public in the precise scientific meaning of particular words. We're never going to fully communicate what's beautiful and noble about scientific caution and rigor. Public discourse is inevitably political, so we need to talk about science in a way that wins the political battle — in no uncertain terms.

I'm all for it . . . OK, now how do we get it done?

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Reborn Again

Cute baby, eh? Wrong, it' a doll, called Reborn Dolls. I saw them on TV today and was totally freaked out. I always think to make anything too close to real, but not quite, makes it creepy. For instance, in animated movies when there have been ones that tried to be realistic it didn't do well and gives people the creeps because the characters are almost real but are still wrong. But movies like Shrek or Japanese Anime are very popular because they are too stylized to bring that sense of wrongness. We can except distortion of the human body within a certain context with no problem. As an artist I've long been aware of that feeling of "Wrongness". When most people look at a piece of art they usually don't know enough about art to say why they feel what they do, but they can intuitively sense when something is wrong. I tend to follow that sense of what is wrong rather than what is good when working. These dolls are just wrong.

To add to the creepiness is the fact that most of these dolls are being collected by adult women, who keep the dolls around all day and treat them just like babies, even when going out. That's just weird. In some ways, though, I don't think most of these women are to blame. Just about all women, and a majority of men, experience a release of endorphins as well as other chemicals, and activates the reward centers in the brain. This is entirely involuntary and bred in by evolution. Let's face it, without those chemicals how many babies would survive to adulthood?

When we oooh and aaaah over a baby face, or any cute and cuddly face like a kittens, it happens automatically. I can well imagine young mothers 100,000 years ago who didn't release those chemicals smashing the baby's head against the rocks because it won't stop crying during the night. Those who did that, or who just left their kid somewhere, would not pass on their genes. While the people strongly moved emotionally will take care of that kid no matter what and have more of them who will pass on their genes. So that chemical reaction to "cuteness" is a very powerful survival mechanism. Studies show pretty much all mammals have this kind of reaction.

So it could be these women haven't had those emotions in a while and suddenly they are holding one of these dolls and their brains explode. And the emotion would continue every time she picked up and cuddled the doll, which would just reinforce their desire for the doll. Blame it on evolution. It's still damn creepy, though.

Books to Read

One of my favorite atheist writers is Massimo Pigliucci, his blog is Rationally Speaking. He doesn't write often but when he does it's always worth a read. What he has on today's blog is a list of must read books.

This is his list of Top Ten books on Evolution.

And this is his Top Ten for Philosophy.

This is on Amazon with a note from Massimo on each book. I have to admit I haven't read even one of these, but I've heard about most of them, read parts of them and read people talking about them. It seems odd that a defender of evolution such as myself, with a better than average knowledge of the subject has never read Origin of Species by Darwin. When it comes to scientific stuff I prefer magazine articles, entire books can be very daunting, plus I know that many things have changed in evolutionary science since Darwin's day so I tend to think it's better to read more modern things.

Expelled

There is a new film out called Expelled, a terrible propaganda piece that is complete lies from beginning to end. It's a film by Ben Stein, a very intelligent and well educated person who believes the absurdity that evolution is not true and is willing to blatantly lie in a movie to make his point.

PZ Myers implores everyone to put a link on their site to another site called Expelled Exposed.

Vjack on Atheist Revolution also asks all atheists to oppose this film. At first he thought we should all ignore it and not give it any publicity:

With Expelled, creationists are deliberately trying to mislead the public by making the foundation of modern biology seem controversial when it is not. By dressing creationism up in scientific clothing, they seek to present it as a valid hypothesis which mainstream science is neglecting. Rather than openly complaining that science is destroying their religiously-derived worldview, they find it necessary to pretend that mainstream science is somehow biased against their "scientific" alternative.

Make no mistake, ID (Intelligent Design) is not a scientific theory, it is not science at all and has no place in a science classroom in any way and never did. It is purely creationist propaganda that they hope to sneak in by fooling people into thinking that presenting both sides is only fair. It is only fair to present both sides in a science classroom - if it's science! If it is religion it does not belong in a science class. Vjack goes on to explain an even more alarming reason to oppose this movie:

I am also worried that Expelled both reflects and may help fuel bigotry toward atheists. By attempting to link Darwin, atheism, fascism, and even the Holocaust, we end up with an anti-atheist hate film as well as a pro-creationist propaganda film. This is truly a Christian extremist's wet dream!

So that is the worst of it, Stein equates Social Darwinism such as what the Nazis believed, with actual evolutionary science and equates Darwinism with atheism. I find this incredibly ironic in that the only people today who still believe in Social Darwinism are the rich, right wingers like Stein, who feel the poor deserve to die from illness if they can't afford health insurance. In other words, the rich are rich because they earned it, and the poor are poor because they deserve to be. Social survival of the fittest.

Worse Than 9/11

We are in the middle of a holocaust yet few seem very concerned, especially those in government who can actually do something about it. Here is a story from California Healthline:

The report estimates that 19,900 Californians between ages 25 and 64 died because of a lack of health insurance between 2000 and 2006 (Families USA release, 4/3). The report estimated that 3,100 adult Californians died in 2006 because they were uninsured and either could not pay for the necessary care or received treatment too late.

3,100 dead in California alone just in the year 2006. That's equal to the toll of 9/11 but no one seems to care. This happens every year and in every state so 3,100 barely scratches the surface. Where is the outrage? Where are the annual memorials? Where are the troops, taking revenge and making sure this can't ever happen again?

And isn't it ironic that we can't do anything about this but we CAN spend $341.4 million per day in Iraq. Why? The answer is simple, guys like George Bush don't care about the little people. Those who claim to not believe in evolution DO believe in social evolution, that the fit survive. Which means if you can't afford health insurance you deserve to die.

And the worst part of it all is that a large portion of America has bought this absurdity. It's better to spend all our resources killing Iraqis than taking care of our own. But mention 9/11 and these hypocrites turn into drama queens.

Bumper Stickers

Happy Darwin Day!!

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

"Darwin Day is the anniversary of the birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809.
Darwin provided the first coherent theory of evolution by means of natural selection. His theory has had far-reaching implications in almost all disciplines and has rocked the very foundation of our knowledge base. Human civilization has been deeply affected by Darwin's work, with over 200 years of evidence supporting his initial findings with modification and refinement continuing to this day. For his contributions to humanity and his commitment to scientific methodology, Charles Robert Darwin is celebrated globally. The date that is recognized by most is that of February 12th, the date of his birth."

Darwin's contribution to human knowledge is simply tremendous, perhaps only Einstein has had greater influence, but it's debatable. All biology & medical science today rests on the foundation Darwin laid down 150 years ago in "Origin of Species."

Evolution is the best scientific theory we have today, fully proven thousands of times of the past 150 years. It's so good a competing theory doesn't even exist.

The God Delusion

I finally got around to getting Dawkins' book and reading it, about one third into it and I have to control my impulse to keep posting quotes from the book. Dawkins not only has some good things to say but has many memorable qoutes from others.

I like what he says in his introduction, he talks about his wife hating her school as a kid, when she told her parents as an adult they were shocked and asked why she didn't tell them. She replied that she didn't know she could. And that is what this book is about, telling those who have major doubts about their religion, or just vague non-believers in general, that they can be atheists, it's perfectly acceptable. In some parts of this country someone might never have met anyone who isn't a Christian, and has only heard negative things about atheism, it can be hard to shake off what you've had drilled into you your entire life. These books give such people permission to be atheist. And the fact that Dawkins and Sam Harris have both made the best sellers list shows more than just the choir is buying these books.

But I have to do at least one quote, this one is from Douglas Adams and how he felt when he finally understood evolution:

"It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."