Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World 9780231539357

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Who's in Charge of the World’s Mysteries?
1. The Traveler to Excellent Beauty: Invited Rather Than Drafted
Part I. Of Spiritual Journeys
2. What Is a Religion?
3. The One Billion
4. The Traveler’s Dark Night of the Soul
Appendix to Chapter 4: Statistics and Probability Meet Job
Part II. The Biology of Religion, the Psychology of Morality
5. Justifying the Ways of God to Man via Evolution
Appendix to Chapter 5: Yes, There Really Is Such a Thing as a Coincidence
6. Does God Want You Dead?
7. Good Without Gods
Part III. The Journey in Tatters
8. Beyond Atheism: The Religion Illusion
9. The Janus-Faced Hominid
Part IV. Ther Heretic's Way: Into the Mysterious Realm
10. Some Strangeness in the Proportion
Appendix to Chapter 10: A Compendium of Mysteries
11. The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand
Appendix to Chapter 11: Welcome to the Inscrutable
12. The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God
13. Summa Mysteriologica
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Excellent Beauty

Excellent Beauty T H E N AT U R A L N E S S O F R E L I G I O N A N D T H E U N N AT U R A L N E S S OF THE WORLD

Eric Dietrich Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dietrich, Eric. Excellent beauty: the naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of the world / Eric Dietrich. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-17102-1 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-53935-7 (e-book) 1. Natural theology. I. Title. bl183.d54 2015 210—dc23 2014034080

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover photo: © Galen Rowell/Mountain Light cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. —“OF BE AUTY,” SIR FRA NC IS BA C ON (1561–1626), E NGLIS H P HILO SO PHER A ND STAT ESMA N

Contents

author’s note acknowledgments Who’s in Charge of the World’s Mysteries?

ix xi xiii

CHAPTER ONE

The Traveler to Excellent Beauty: Invited Rather Than Drafted

1

PA R T O N E

Of Spiritual Journeys

7

CHAPTER TWO

What Is a Religion?

9

CHAPTER THREE

The One Billion

16

CHAPTER FOUR

The Traveler’s Dark Night of the Soul Appendix to Chapter 4: Statistics and Probability Meet Job

28 46

PA R T T W O

The Biology of Religion, the Psychology of Morality

49

CHAPTER FIVE

Justifying the Ways of God to Man via Evolution Appendix to Chapter 5:Yes, There Really Is Such a Thing as a Coincidence

51 65

C ontents

CHAPTER SIX

Does God Want You Dead?

69

CHAPTER SEVEN

Good Without Gods

82

PA R T T H R E E

The Journey in Tatters

91

CHAPTER EIGHT

Beyond Atheism: The Religion Illusion

93

CHAPTER NINE

The Janus-Faced Hominid

97

PA R T F O U R

The Heretic’s Way: Into the Mysterious Realm

113

CHAPTER TEN

Some Strangeness in the Proportion Appendix to Chapter 10: A Compendium of Mysteries

115 143

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand Appendix to Chapter 11: Welcome to the Inscrutable

147 152

C H A P T E R T W E LV E

The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God

155

CHAPTER THRIRTEEN

Summa Mysteriologica

167

notes bibliography index

171 183 189

viii

Author’s Note

T H I S I S A B O O K A B O U T U S A N D O U R S C I E N C E . To do science is to be human. But oddly, our science has given us two ideas that utterly change the way we ought to see ourselves and the universe we grew up in. Stated baldly, the two ideas are evolution and mystery. I use the term “mystery” carefully. The mysteries are truths that science has revealed but that we can only weakly understand. I call such mysteries excellent beauties. Mostly, the two ideas are ignored. True, the first causes some turmoil, especially in the United States. But this very turmoil obscures evolution’s depth and importance. The second, and far more profound, idea is ignored even by the scientists who unearthed it—I should say, especially, by those scientists. Some writers and researchers have tried telling us about the second idea, the excellent beauties, but their message isn’t getting through because of how far the second idea takes us out of our comfort zone. The two ideas are deeply related; this is one of main messages of this book. Exploring and analyzing this relation should shed light on both ideas and increase their visibility. The central theme of the book is the excellent beauties themselves, what they are and why they are beautiful. The title of this book is derived from them, with help from Francis Bacon.

Acknowledgments

O V E R T H E Y E A R S , I H A V E H A D C O N V E R S A T I O N S with many people about the ideas in this book. I thank: Matt Brin and Tom Head for mathematical discussions; David Chalmers for discussions about the mind, consciousness, and knowledge; Anne Clark for discussions about cognition in nonhuman animals, and for coteaching courses with me on this topic; Rick Dale for discussions about human psychology; Terrence Deacon for the idea that humans are both African apes yet deserving of their own phylum; Chris Fields for discussions about everything from artificial intelligence to zoology; Kris Gilbert for discussions of religions, religious mysteries, and Neopaganism; Charles Goodman for discussions about Buddhism; David Martin for discussions about religion and Christianity; Ally Peltier for discussions on religion and witchcraft, and for helping me teach Witchcraft and Science, where early ideas that eventually resulted in this book were presented; Graham Priest for discussions of paraconsistent logics and the structure of nothingness; Stephen David Ross for discussions about how weird science really is; Elizabeth Tucker for discussions about style, language, tone, and other details; Zach Weber for discussions about how weird philosophy really is and also for discussions about paraconsistent logics and paraconsistency in mathematics; and David Sloan Wilson for discussions about evolution and how our religious proclivities shaped and were shaped by our evolution. Also, Anne Clark, David, and I cotaught a course on the evolution of immorality. That course was a real eye-opener.

A c k now led g m e n t s

I also thank fellow-travelers Tom Head (again), Karen Fisher, David Martin (again), Chris Pogson, and Julia Rose for reading and commenting on early drafts of this book. Thanks especially to Tom for ideas about how to present the mathematical proofs. Thanks to Lynn George for geology discussions and for reading and commenting on the description of Wyoming’s Shirley Basin. Books seem to develop a mind or personality of their own, and this book went in a different direction than originally planned, so I couldn’t include the Shirley Basin description, unfortunately. Jake Bartholomew gave me some sage advice on the first part of the book, and Elahd Bar-Shai read and commented on an early draft—thanks to both. I received several good comments from Binghamton University undergraduate students in my Science and Religion courses (fall 2009, spring 2011). I want to especially thank Melissa Foster for her long list of good comments. And for a late-night brainstorming session in the fall of 2013, I thank: Jacey Gottlieb, Kyle Kilmetis, Sean Kindya, Matt Martello, Matthew Polistina, Nate Powell, and Sean Stapleton. Also, I thank three anonymous Columbia University Press referees, as well as Wendy Lochner, Robert Demke, and all the people at CUP who worked hard shepherding this book through the whole process. As always, I thank my friend and longtime colleague Chris Fields for many detailed, erudite, and incisive comments on several previous drafts, all of which he read all the way through. Finally, thanks to my wife, Tara, for her help and encouragement, and thanks to the rest of my family, up, down, and sideways, all of whom wanted the Shirley Basin part included.

xii

Who’s in Charge of the World’s Mysteries?

I N 1 6 3 3 , W H E N H E W A S S I X T Y- N I N E , Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life by the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church.The imprisonment lasted until his death in 1642. History records that Galileo received this condemnation because he published his now famous book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The two chief systems were the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the solar system and the geocentric view (Earth-centered). In his Dialogue, and using the best scientific evidence available (evidence to which he contributed), Galileo argued for the heliocentric view and against the geocentric view favored by the Church. It wasn’t until 1758 that the Catholic Church dropped its prohibition against publishing books on heliocentrism. And it wasn’t until October 31, 1992, that the Church (Pope John Paul II) admitted that it had made a mistake with Galileo and the heliocentric theory, and cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing. It made this public four days later. Finally, in 2000, 367 years after the deed, the Church (again, in the person of Pope John Paul II) formally apologized for its treatment of Galileo. It is common knowledge that the main force behind the Catholic Church’s condemnation was that Galileo’s argument clashed with the Bible. In the biblical texts, Psalm 93:1, 96:10, 104:5, and 1 Chronicles 16:30, we read that Earth does not and cannot be moved. But in Ecclesiastes 1:5, we read that sun does move. But far more than just biblical

W h o’s i n C h a r g e o f t he Wo r l d ’s M y s t e r i e s ?

literalism was going on here. After all, the Bible was appealed to as an authority. Why would an authority be needed? Because the Catholic Church needed everything concerning the working of the ordinary world to be settled. Everything. The Church’s hegemonic power rested in large part on the idea that the mundane world was pretty much exactly as it appeared, and that the spiritual realm, with all its awesome mysteries, was revealed truth to which the Catholic Church had sole access. There were no mysteries at all in the secular world. All the mysteries relevant to a human’s life emanated from Catholic Christianity and from nowhere else. Naturally, if the only important mysteries were the property of the Church, then the only deep explanations belonged to the Church as well. Science, therefore, was excluded both as a source of mystery and as a source of deep and powerful explanations. If questions arose about this ownership of truth, as they did when Galileo published his Dialogues, they could be completely and fully answered by appealing to the Bible . . . or to force, when the former strategy failed. Galileo is important, therefore, not so much because he contradicted scripture, but because he radically changed the font of mystery and truth from a supernatural world managed and controlled by the Catholic Church to the secular world—the very world we live in every day. The Galilean lesson is that the deepest mysteries and the deepest explanations are free and available to everyone. They lie right in front of us. Armed with ordinary, competent schooling, average citizens have access to a world rich in strange and beautiful truths. A priestly class is not needed. A class consisting of those who are “specially chosen” is not needed. All that is needed is a single person with a desire to learn. The Galilean lesson is in full force here. But I take matters one important step further. This book is primarily about scientific mysteries— profound, beautiful mysteries, accessible to everyone, which reveal that there’s more to our world than meets the eye, and more to our world than science has so far explained. Indeed, a major thesis of this book is that there is more to the world than science can explain. Unlike Galileo, I cannot argue for this thesis without first explicitly dealing with religion. So, this is also a book about the war between science and religion: about how science has won this war so thoroughly that it can explain why religion will not go away, why there are people who choose God over science. How are these two topics related? Understanding how xiv

W h o ’s i n C h a r g e o f t he Worl d’s M yst er ies?

science explains religion will sweep away the debris concealing the true importance of what many regard as science’s shortcomings: the mysteries. But I will argue that revealing these mysteries is science’s greatest accomplishment. And I say this while very mindful of science’s stunning successes and world-altering accomplishments. I have structured this book, loosely, as a travelogue, as the progress report of a sort of journey—a journey to a realm revealed by science, but unexplained by it. I did this for one reason. I want to move the reader, at least temporarily, from religious mysteries to the scientific ones. I want the reader to come to see the scientific mysteries as not only beautiful, but as every bit as important to being human as any religious mystery. This task is best accomplished in steps, the big ones being, firstly, understanding the nature of spiritual journeys; secondly, understanding how science explains the existence of all human religions; and finally, understanding how the scientific mysteries are more than mere puzzles to be solved. So, this book is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress. But unlike John Bunyan’s famous Christian allegory (1678), Excellent Beauty is not an allegory: the reader can actually take the journey just by reading this book. Most spiritual journeys are encounters with spiritual teachers. Consequently, the stories of such journeys always leave something out, namely, the actual, physical teacher encountered. But this journey is instead an encounter with ideas, and unlike human teachers, ideas don’t lose substance when reported. And these ideas are free and available to everyone of every creed, from every walk of life. So the encounter is right here in these pages. The first major idea encountered is that religion is biological. The world’s religions are an evolutionary response to a difficult planet. But in the usual clashes between science and religion, especially in the last two hundred or so years, science wins, and the debris left over is assumed to be mundane, bereft of spirit, and unable to speak to human longing for a universe bigger than our understanding. This has always been incorrect. Mundane debris is a myth we tell ourselves because we are in the grip of religion. Biology is ending religion, but a boring, mechanical world, fully laid bare by theories and equations, is not what is left over. Instead, an exciting, perplexing, mysterious world is revealed, a world that could speak to human longing, if we were to challenge religion’s tyrannical definition of what such longing should be. In matters of the spirit, it is not science that is the problem, it is religion. xv

W h o’s i n C h a r g e o f t he Wo r l d ’s M y s t e r i e s ?

But in matters of deeply understanding the nature of the world, it is not religion that is the problem, it is science. Many scientists revel in a world that is flatly natural. This seems to be the world they want to live in, and they bridle when this want is thwarted. But the journey recorded here reveals that this interpretation is wrong. The world is not flatly natural. This is the conclusion that science actually reveals to us. In part 1 of the book, the journey begins. I define the term “religion,” since if science is going to explain it, it would be nice to know what it is. I don’t define “science,” relying rather on the reader’s intuitive notions. I also introduce the One Billion—the one billion nonreligious people on planet Earth—currently the third most common religious preference. And finally, I discuss the eventual and deep disappointment that every spiritual traveler has to come to terms with. Some overcome this; others do not. But it’s this disappointment’s existence and ubiquity that are most relevant to us. This topic requires discussion of, among other things, the problem of evil: how could a good god allow evil? Part 2 is where I make the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. This conclusion is actually forced on us; there is no other explanation for the stunning quantity and diversity of religious practice, coupled with religion’s iron grip on human rationality. If we count varieties, there are tens of thousands of religions on planet Earth, and religious belief persists in the face of stunning and compelling counter evidence. One important consequence of this evolutionary view is that religion is rendered useless for grounding morality. So, I also offer some ways that morality can be grounded in the natural world without using any religion at all. The truths discovered in parts 1 and 2, however, prove to be anathema to any spiritual journey. Part 3 is about this. The idea is that by part 3, any spiritual journey will have come apart at the seams. Almost nothing will be left. However, in part 4, a new direction is discovered: there is some strangeness in the proportion. And this strangeness offers to reinvigorate the traveler with hope, beauty, and even meaning, of a new sort. We see this strangeness in the scientific mysteries. These mysteries are really the central topic of this book and are discussed in chapter 10. Consequences of the existence of scientific mysteries are discussed in chapters 11, 12, and 13. Then, finally, the journey ends, successfully: the universe we inhabit is revealed to contain deep and important mysteries at which we are invited to marvel but which we cannot explain and cannot explain away. xvi

ONE

The Traveler to Excellent Beauty Invited Rather Than Drafted

S P I R I T U A L J O U R N E Y S O F T E N B E G I N unintentionally: the traveler is drafted. Abraham and Moses were minding their own business when they got called into service by Yahweh.1 Same with Joseph and Mary (though, for her, the call was a bit more personal and intrusive). But the reader’s journey need not begin unintentionally. This chapter, I hope, will function as your invitation. It introduces the reader to the sorts of things the demise of religion clears the way for. I present the invitation as it came to me. I have a scientist’s disposition. I am naturally drawn to science and fascinated by all of it. I’m educated in it, and I work in it often (but not exclusively). I find it beautiful and, more importantly, I find it truthful. But it is not exactly clear what “truthful” means. Usually correspondence with facts is considered crucial for truth. So finding science truthful means that I think there are facts—exhibited for all to see and for all to question. And yes, I do think this, as do many, perhaps most, people. But facts can be, as we will see, very strange things. As a close friend of science, I thought that spiritual journeys didn’t really exist, because spirits didn’t exist. One might think that he or she was on some spiritual quest, but that belief was mistaken. No one had an inner spiritual nature; no one had an inner nature at all. One had inner organs, but no inner nature. One was one’s body. One’s mind was one’s working brain. And the world was everywhere flatly natural.

1

T h e Tra vel e r t o E x c e l l e n t B e a u t y

That all began to change rather rapidly as the millennium came to its end. Though frequently a practicing scientist and scientifically minded, I am a philosopher by training and, often, by trade. In the mid-1990s, something extraordinary happened: the size of the universe doubled. To explain this, I have to do a bit of philosophy, so please bear with me. Most people believe that their minds are completely distinct from their brains.Your brain is an organ, but you are not just your organs; you are more than your working brain. This belief is widespread throughout the world, and has also been commonly held throughout history. It is a reasonable belief for reasons that, when looked at closely, become very complicated. We can, however, simplify things. The short version is that experiences—say, the experiences you have when eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream—don’t seem like brain processes. Experiences are painful, sad, joyful, mysterious, tart, sweet, red, blue, loud, and so on. But brain processes are none of these things. Brain processes are electrochemical charges racing along neurons. They are fast or slow, distributed widely or narrowly, and relayed and modulated by neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, many of whom didn’t even know the brain was the organ of thought (Hippocrates apparently being a notable exception), thinking and experiencing were considered to be something that a physical organ couldn’t do. So, you seem to be made up of (at least) two different kinds of things, or you comprise two different kinds of properties: experiential, mental properties, and physical, biological properties. This view is called dualism (“dual” for two). Probably the most famous statement of dualism in Western philosophy is Descartes’s (1596–1650), an important French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes argued that our bodies are machines, which obey the laws of physics (which he was quite unclear on, actually, since, during his life, not much physics was known), but our bodies, he thought, are animated by our minds, which are nonphysical—sort of like souls. So, for Descartes, the material body and the nonmaterial mind interact . . . somehow—the soul drives the machine and gets information about the world via the machine’s sensory apparatus.2 But since sometime in the early twentieth century, most philosophers and most brain scientists have concluded that one’s mind is one’s working brain—experiences are just brain processes. (As is usual, the 2

T h e Tra ve l er t o Excel l ent Beaut y

philosophical arguments tended to follow the scientific ones, in the last century or so.) There is nothing to you, as a person, over and above your working brain. Your personality, understandings, ability to speak and read this book, your capacity to love, your addiction to chocolate, your fear of spiders, your love of Jesus or the Buddha, every bit of you . . . is just a property of your physical brain. This belief is called physicalism or materialism (I’ll use the former since “materialism” is often used to mean an excessive regard for material goods). Physicalism is a kind of monism: the mind and working brain are really just one thing. Brain scientists and many philosophers believe physicalism for the standard scientific reason, which is that the preponderance of evidence points that way (two examples are discussed below), and because of a very serious problem with Cartesian dualism. One of the laws of physics (unknown to Descartes) is the First Law of Thermodynamics (also called the Law of the Conservation of Energy). It says that matter and energy (both physical things, this is important) cannot be created or destroyed, but only moved around and altered into different versions. Cartesian dualism appears to require both the creation of new energy and the destruction (or vanishing) of already-existing energy. To see this, assume dualism is true. When you decide to go get some more chocolate ice cream, your nonphysical mind causes your physical body to move toward the refrigerator. But how? Did your mind use some sort of nonphysical “energy” to cause your physical body to start moving? That’s impossible, according to the First Law. From a physical standpoint, your body was just sitting there. In order to “push” it toward your fridge, your nonphysical mind needed to interact with your physical motor neurons. This interaction couldn’t occur unless your nonphysical mind caused new energy to bleed into the universe. This is like starting your car by just thinking about starting it. Dualism requires energy to vanish out of the universe, too. If you stub your toe, it’ll hurt. Physical information (a form of energy) racing along your neurons informs your nonphysical mind of the stubbing and your nonphysical mind feels the pain (or you feel the pain). Where did that neural energy go? It vanished into the nonphysical realm of your mind. As I said, this was fine for Descartes, he knew nothing of thermodynamics. But we do. And such creation and vanishing of energy are not acceptable anymore, and more importantly, we have strong reasons to believe that such creation and vanishing cannot exist. 3

T h e Tra vel e r t o E x c e l l e n t B e a u t y

So, with evidence pulling philosophers and scientists toward physicalism, and the crackup of Cartesian dualism on the shoals of the First Law, physicalism became the preferred view of the mind. Here are two simple examples of physicalism’s pull: 1. Brain trauma frequently results in cognitive or experiential loss. The simplest explanation of this is that brain processes are mental processes. In fact, you don’t need a blow to your head to see this. Every time you drink alcohol, take an aspirin, get a good (or bad) night’s sleep, and so on you establish further data for the identity of brain and mind: your experiences change for chemical (physical) reasons having to do with your brain. 2. Many thought processes are widely thought to be computational. Using this fact and facts about the behavior of neurons in brains, a theory has been developed of how thoughts and thinking are actually physically implemented in brains. Think of your favorite computer game (a role-playing game is a good example). The game is completely physical (because it is implemented and hence exists only on a physical machine), yet the game can be highly interactive, lifelike, and robust, transporting you to another reality. This “mind as very complex computer” theory is still in the working hypothesis stage (a stage that can last for decades), but at a minimum, it offers a compelling explanation of how thoughts, emotions, and even our selves could be physical: they are computational processes implemented complexly in brains. Brain science, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology are young, so scientists studying the mind or the brain (the two require quite different techniques and tools) still do not understand a lot of what happens in the brain, in the neurons, or in the gaps (the synapses) between the neurons. And they do not yet completely understand how brain processes result in thought, in thinking. But every science went through a stage like this. So everyone is very optimistic that, perhaps this century, or maybe the next, we will have a full understanding—a theory—of how the working brain produces a conscious mind. (As we will see in chapter 10, this optimism is unwarranted, yet it shouldn’t be replaced by pessimism.) So, physicalism is the received scientific and philosophical doctrine. This doctrine is held so strongly that to deny it is a kind of heresy—yes, 4

T h e Tra ve l er t o Excel l ent Beaut y

there is such a thing as heresy even among completely nonreligious philosophers and scientists. At the turn of the millennium, and now in the twenty-first century, dualism is heresy. As an aside, note that, doctrinally, no religion on planet Earth, not one, embraces physicalism. They cannot, since they are all in one way or another committed to spirits, souls, inner essences, gods and goddess communicating with humans, and so on. (We will return to this topic in chapter 2.) This is just one of the many places where science and religion clash. We will explore many others. Then, in the mid-1990s, it began to look like physicalism couldn’t be the whole story. Certain aspects of one’s mind appeared to be not physical. Conscious experience itself was reevaluated and seemed to be somehow nonphysical or extraphysical. While deciding to eat some chocolate ice cream was still thought to be physical, experiencing the taste of the chocolate ice cream was reassigned as nonphysical. Dualism was back. The philosopher at the center of this new dualism and the new controversy was David Chalmers. Why did Chalmers believe dualism was correct? He had a very interesting argument (the philosophical equivalent of a proof in mathematics; we will fully explore a version of this argument in chapter 10).3 The conclusion of Chalmers’s argument was that conscious experience—seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, feeling, emotions . . . all of it—was nonphysical.Yes, what eyes and the vision system in the brain do—process light and information—is physical. But the actual experience of seeing, say, your beloved dog or a glorious sunset or just this book is not physical (same with all the other senses). Did that mean Chalmers thought humans had souls? Far from it. But his argument did force him to commit the heresy: he came out for the view that consciousness is not a physical property of the brain. With this new dualism, Chalmers doubled the size of the universe. The physicalists claimed that the universe contained only physical stuff (matter and energy and other stuff like dark matter and dark energy [also discussed further in chapter 10]) and physical properties (being heavy, being red, being faster than sound, and so on). Chalmers, however, concluded that the universe comprised not only the physical realm, but the phenomenological or experiential realm, too—the realm of experiencing seeing something red, experiencing running fast, hearing a dog bark, and so on. For every physical property, there was at least 5

T h e Tra vel e r t o E x c e l l e n t B e a u t y

the potential for experiencing that property. So there is the physical realm and its associated experiential realm. And this experiential realm was every bit as real as the physical one. Hence, the size of the universe doubled.4 Dualism is still a heresy, but perhaps a tiny bit less so nowadays. This heresy had a strong effect on me. For, if dualism is true, then consciousness is beyond the reach of science. Science can only study what is physical because science has to measure things in order to be science, and measuring requires physicality (scientific measuring also requires being public, a property whose importance is impossible to overstate). So, if dualism is true, then there is more to conscious life in this universe than can be explained by science. This isn’t the standard basis for a spiritual journey, but it is quite sufficient, for it opens the door to mystery. And this mystery is real and available to everyone for free. Consciousness is absolutely central to human existence. If it is also essentially mysterious, that changes things . . . rather a lot, really.

6

PA RT O N E

Of Spiritual Journeys

TWO

What Is a Religion?

So we can know what we’re talking about, we need a definition of the term “religion,” as well as the more general terms “spiritual journey” and “spiritual traveler.” The latter two are rather easy to define. I use the term “spiritual traveler” to include all religious people as well as those who define their spiritual journey more idiosyncratically or esoterically. And a spiritual journey is any seeking after a mystical or transcendent understanding of life. Spiritual journeys vary widely. A trip to Stonehenge, to Lourdes, to Mecca, to Graceland, to Hollywood and Vine, to Cape Canaveral, to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, to the Burgess Shale in Canada, where unusual fossils from 505 million years ago are preserved better than anywhere else on Earth, could all count as spiritual journeys. They are spiritual primarily because of their destination. But a spiritual destination needn’t be part of a spiritual journey. An aboriginal walkabout is a spiritual quest with no real destination in mind. Disappearing into the wilderness for forty days also counts, as does taking a vow of chastity and being a parish priest for forty years. Or one can deliberately go nowhere, at least visibly, and simply sit under a Bodhi tree thinking and meditating (as did Siddhartha Gautama on his way to becoming the Supreme Buddha). The journey can begin abruptly when one sees the universe in a spider’s web. Or it can begin gradually, starting out as a vague longing or as a poorly understood spiritual crisis, as Saint Francis of Assisi’s did. The journey can end abruptly when, for example, enlightenment F I R S T T H I N G S F I R S T.

9

O f S pi r i tu a l J o u r n e y s

suddenly comes to the student of Zen, or it can slowly reach its apogee over decades, only to be discerned in the fullness of old age. Now to define “religion,” which is less easy. All the religions I will discuss have three properties. (I mean to include all the world’s religions, though I will not refer explicitly to each and every one of them; there are far too many for that.) Each is a social system of some sort; each endorses, and actually requires, something that is supernatural; and each has something to do with something holy or sacred.1 The first of these is the easiest to define. By “social,” I simply mean that a bunch of people get together to practice/worship in/participate in their religion. Religions are communal, they foster community, and they can help communities thrive. As I use the term, there are no oneperson religions (though, of course, each person probably has a personal interpretation of his or her religion). There are plenty of solitary practitioners of religions, but such people still derive their religion from the greater community of their religion, and the community often derives insights and religious depth from its solitary practitioners as well. The social aspect of religion also serves as a potent source for what many consider to be religion’s central contribution to human life: morality. We will return to this point in chapter 3 and in part 2. The second property is less easy to define, but not impossible. The supernatural can be anything currently considered outside the realm of science (which is vast). Being outside the realm of science means either violating a known law of any of the sciences (say, violating the First Law of Thermodynamics from physics, which, as we saw in chapter 1, says that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed), or being completely unexplainable by any of the theories of science. None of these violations can be flukes; they have to be regarded as standard and repeatable by the members of the religion. The realm of the supernatural includes: • the existence of all deities (all gods and goddesses are supernatural; for example, Zeus can turn into a swan or, apparently, any other animal; Yahweh existed before time, and some think “he” is even outside of time altogether); • the existence of souls or spirits (many religions distinguish between these two) that are thought to make up the essence of a person or human being and that may survive death; 10

What I s a R el igion?

• surviving or coming back from (prolonged) death in any form; • places like the Christian Heaven and Hell, the Norse Valhalla, and the Neopagan Summerland; • personal processes like baptism, being absolved of sins, being possessed by a spirit of some sort; • casting spells, casting out demons, riding brooms, communicating with dead ancestors, deities, trees, or animals (telling a dog to sit doesn’t count, of course; something much more complex is required, like a conversation with said dog about the meaning of life); • . . . and so forth. A complicating factor is that the members of a religion need not think of the supernatural aspects of their religion as supernatural. There were and are cultures where the religion and the culture are very closely related—almost indistinguishable. The Amish are a modern example, the Mayans an older one. In such cultures, ordinary daily activities (like eating) and ordinary daily things (like trees and animals) are themselves imbued with religious significance. In these cultures, there is no clean distinction between the natural and the supernatural. As a good example: there are cultures where it is just obvious that there are inherently evil people who do evil things, and they can do these things using various potions, gestures, and other tools and devices. In English, we always translate the indigenous words for such people as “witch.”2 Witches are often regarded as natural, and not supernatural at all. The same is true of shamans in certain cultures. They cure illnesses using various techniques and skills. Such cultures have a different view of what is natural: magic, for example, is natural.3 Of course science in these cultures is not very advanced. (This is not to deny that the people in such cultures know a lot of intricate details about their environments. For example, plant lore in such cultures is usually extensive and very useful.) But from outside the culture, what is natural and what is supernatural are clearly distinguishable. Unless you violate what we know about diseases and human perception, you can’t make someone sick (say, making his liver fail) by looking at him a certain way or blowing a certain powder in his direction. So the issue is not whether people regard aspects of their religion as supernatural, but whether or not said aspects are in fact supernatural, whether they are objectively supernatural. For us, here, that means working in a way that is contrary to the way 11

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scientists think the world works, which we actually embody not only in our sciences, but also in our other quotidian knowledge. Of course, what we know changes; our sciences change, too. One day, we might in fact discover that we were wrong all along, and in fact you can make someone’s liver fail by looking at him in just the right way. And we might further discover that the right way is hard to learn—a natural gift for witchcraft is required before one can actually learn it (not unlike music or art). But until we do discover these things, evil witchcraft is supernatural—it violates what is known now about how diseases and perception work. Note that were we to discover that looking at someone in a certain way, using the “evil eye,” could make his liver fail, we would very probably have a theory of the physical mechanism of such looking (or at least we’d definitely set out to find such a theory). With such a theory we’d know why looking at someone in that way caused his liver to fail. Furthermore, and this is the key, being able to answer the “why” question with a mechanism would allow us to successfully and repeatedly test our theory—indeed, we could make someone’s liver fail by looking at him in the right way (so, of course, this research would have military applications and hence get a lot of funding). Such mechanistic explanations are the bread and butter of science. So, if we discover that the evil eye can, if done right, make someone’s liver fail, that will show not that magic or witchcraft exists, but that the evil eye is a natural phenomenon, as scientists define the term “natural.” Our notion of what is natural will have to expand. Such expansions have happened many times in the history of science. Consider an important contrast here: People who believe in (evil) witches, like the Lugbara in Uganda, also know why looking at people a certain way makes them sick. The explanation is obvious: the person doing the looking is a witch (see the Cognitive Science paper by Legare and Gelman).This is a very straightforward “explanation.” But it doesn’t actually explain anything. In particular, it fails tests of its truth: the spells are unrepeatable, uncontrollable, not publicly demonstrable, and so on; and without these, not only are the claims rationally regarded as false, the terms “witch” and “magic” lose any substantial meaning. . . . This is just another way of saying that witchcraft is supernatural (of course, those who embrace science will say, rather, that this means witchcraft doesn’t exist). 12

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Are UFOs supernatural? Most UFO-ologists think that UFOs are spaceships from other planets and, hence, are at least somewhat natural. And though the aliens that pilot the ships have a grasp of science far exceeding ours, there is no logical or biological or psychological impediment to our one day achieving such an advanced grasp ourselves. Contrast this with Zeus turning into a swan to seduce (rape) Leda. . . . No human is ever going to turn into a swan. Furthermore, the space aliens are here on Earth doing what we’d call anthropology or field biology. They are observing us, roughly, like we observe chimpanzees in the wild. There’s nothing holy or supernatural about that. (Oddly, though they warp time and space to get here, when these space aliens examine one of us, their medical technology is so crude as to remind one of medieval torture machines.) Other aspects of UFOs’ naturalness depend, in part, on where they come from and how fast they traveled to get here. Assuming they get here from anywhere very far away, say, further away than a few dozen light-years (the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.2 light-years away), and therefore had to travel faster than the speed of light, then possibly they are supernatural, because they would then violate the Einsteinian principle that no regular matter can travel faster than the speed of light. Of course, though unlikely, maybe the principle is false, or perhaps the space aliens developed some ultra–high tech way to get around this principle, like using a wormhole, for example. But even if UFOs are supernatural, UFO-ology (also called “Ufology”) doesn’t constitute a religion. Why? There are two reasons, and these are important for us. First, UFO-ology doesn’t push a specific UFO-based morality that binds a social group together. Though UFOologists are a community of sorts, they don’t follow a unique set of proscriptive rules. (For more, see chapter 3.) Secondly, there’s nothing holy or sacred about UFOs, their major historical sites (for example, Roswell, New Mexico), or their leaders (though a few UFO-ologists dispute this, so these few do have at least a protoreligion). On most construals, UFOs are just some advanced chunks of technology built by an advanced species. We may ourselves visit distant planets and study any life-forms we find there. This would hardly make us holy or sacred. So, UFO-ology is not a religion (in its standard form). Though we can see that UFO-ology lacks any claims to holiness or sacredness, it is very hard to define the notions of “holy” and “sacred.” 13

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Everyone seems to know what they mean, but everyone disagrees on what is holy or sacred. To some, Stonehenge is holy, but the Vatican is just a place; to others, the situation is reversed. Holiness and sacredness are usually defined in relation to religious veneration and divine power, but that would be circular here, since I am using holiness and sacredness to define religion. I think that the notions of holiness and sacredness are prior to religion: they are more fundamental notions. We humans developed the notions of sacredness and holiness first and then religions grew out of these (as we will see in part 2). I also think that these two notions are more intuitive to us than the notions surrounding any particular religion. As children, sacredness and holiness are concepts that are more easily grasped than most of the specifics of our parents’ religion. If something is sacred (or holy, these will be considered the same thing for our purposes), it is set apart from ordinary things. So, right off, sacredness and ordinariness are distinguished. But putrefying things are set apart, yet they aren’t sacred. The sacred, unlike putrefying things, draws us in toward it, in part because it seems glorious (which putrefying things do not). So, other aspects of the sacred include being good, beautiful (often intrinsically beautiful), pure, glorious, or in some way worthy of profound respect (for example, being ancient, not just old), being grandly mysterious or starkly and profoundly different from or better than the ordinary, being more real than ordinary reality, imbuing with deep meaning those who come in contact with the sacred thing or place, being powerful . . . and being, perhaps, forbidden. . . . This stab at a definition will have to do. It is important to mention here that the mysteries—the excellent beauties—we will discuss in chapter 10 are not supernatural at all. That is why they are freely available to everyone; that is why they are public; that is why they exist. But are the mysteries holy? That is a harder question. In chapter 12, we will discuss expanding the notion of sacredness to include the mysteries even though they might seem decidedly nonsacred because they result from science, mathematics, and philosophy. Finally, the supernatural and the sacred are linked in religion. Ghosts are supernatural, but, like UFOs, they are not (usually) holy or sacred (the Holy Ghost in the Christian trinity is better named the Holy Spirit). So, there’s no religion just of ghosts. Within a religion, everything that is holy has some sort of supernatural component or 14

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aspect. Visiting Stonehenge for the summer solstice and feeling its sacred nature also engender feelings of touching something supernatural, something beyond the natural realm. Now, having defined religion and spiritual journeys, we need to go deeper, for being a spiritual traveler of any sort is doing something very real. However, the reality of being a traveler should be sharply distinguished from the question of whether the journey is real. The question of whether the journey is real takes us to the One Billion. After that, we will return to the harsh reality of being a traveler.

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The One Billion

T H E T H I R D M O S T C O M M O N R E L I G I O U S preference among humans on planet Earth (after Christianity and Islam, respectively) is unaffiliated or nonreligious (people in this category list themselves as secular, atheist, agnostic, or simply nonreligious).1 Well over one billion people classify themselves as unaffiliated. That’s over 16 percent of the world’s total population (which was, when these statistics were collected, a little under seven billion people). That so many people seem not to feel the tug of organized religion is an occasion for much rejoicing among many because they regard religions of all stripes as the source of profound pain and suffering. Consider the Crusades, for an obvious example. And, I hasten to point out, one needn’t kill in the name of one’s religion to cause pain and suffering. If 16 percent of the world’s people are eschewing organized religion, that might mean that the good of the world’s religions is negligible. In fact, there are those who believe that life on Earth would drastically improve if there were no religions at all.2 Why are there one billion unaffiliated people? What fact about religion explains the One Billion? There are, no doubt, several facts that are relevant and in play here, but certainly one important fact is this: There is not one single indisputable bit of evidence in support of any spiritual or religious belief whatsoever. If, upon reading that last sentence, you say, “But what about the time I talked with Jesus/felt the grace of God/experienced transcendence/experienced Oneness/saw the handiwork of Coyote/cast a spell . . . ?” I will point to the unique-

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ness of your experience, and to its being unshared. And then I’ll point to the vast variety of religions and religious experiences: Could they all be authentic? If not, then which ones are? The number of religions that differ profoundly from one another is very large. So, it is implausible that they are all true. But if not all, which one of them is true? You want to say, “Mine is.” The number of people in different religions saying this is of course also very large. However, though not all the religions can be true, all of them can be false. It is important, in this context, to remember that we all know very well what it is to be an atheist (whether a member of the One Billion or not), for we are all atheists with respect to all of the religions of planet Earth—all but one: ours.3 The word “indisputable” in the preceding paragraph is not used in any unusual sense. It simply means public and repeatable. A public fact is a fact anyone can check. And when they do check, the repeatability of the fact guarantees that they will get the same result as others who check. Science is based on such public, repeatable facts. When soberly considered, there is not one repeatable, public fact that everyone can use to establish the truth of any spiritual, religious claim. This is one reason there are so many religions, differing wildly from one another. Let’s take a moment to contrast this situation with science. Every claim ever made by any scientist is on public display, waiting for you or anyone else to refute it. You don’t like the fact that Earth is spherical? Fine. Get out your measuring tools and check this truth out for yourself. Don’t know how? Also fine. You can learn how to do the measuring at your local college or public library. You’ll have to learn some ordinary physics, but a committed person would never let that get in the way. Don’t like the fact that you are an African ape? Fine. Learn the required biology and paleontology and refute it. Again, it will take work, but all good things take work. Though no one that I know of is working to refute Earth’s sphericalness, I know of many who are working to refute evolutionary theory. More power to them. It is instructive to ponder why Earth’s sphericalness, or any other well-known physics fact, gets no attention from religious fundamentalism. These physical facts are as inimical to fundamentalist versions of any religion as biological facts. Why? Because no scientific fact exists in isolation. All sciences cohere in a certain way. For example, the very same facts that explain why Earth is spherical—such facts as the nature of gravity and Earth’s composition—also reveal the nature, origin, and 17

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age of the solar system. From here we are lead ineluctably to the nature, origin, and age of the universe: approximately 13.7 billion years. The same is true of evolution. No universe with the chemical and atomic facts of ours could fail to have evolutionary processes occurring on its planets with life on them. Evolution, therefore, is not some ad hoc addon. It is written into the foundation of our universe. So, just as in physics, evolutionary theory is winning—by a lot. It is winning in a fair, public, dozens-of-decades-long, and never-ending contest. All standing scientific theories are winners in a struggle to refute them, which can last for centuries in its acute stage, but never truly ends completely. This is simply the nature of science. If you think the moon is made of green cheese—wonderful. Get in a rocket, go there, bring some moon stuff back and check it to see if it is green cheese. Then, and this is the essence of science, let others check, too—not only the moon stuff you brought back, but your actual calculations, lab tests, and results. Make your entire journey and all its associated paperwork public. If you are genuinely interested in the truth, you will encourage others to go to the moon and get their own moon stuff and check it to see if it is green cheese. (The moon, by the way, is made mostly of kinds of basalt and anorthosite, not green cheese. But don’t take my word for it.) I said that there is not one repeatable, public fact that everyone can latch onto to establish the truth of any spiritual claim. I know many deny this, so let me phrase it as a scientist would, as a challenge: let anyone who has a public and repeatable spiritual fact come forward and demonstrate it to all. Even the most nonreligious person would have to reevaluate her disbelief, as would all those who belong to some other religion. To really see the clash between science and religion, consider this question: given the importance of religion, of religious morality, of matters of the spirit, why don’t we insist that our most robust methods of scientific confirmation be deployed to establish the truth of religious ontological claims? The supernatural ones are the ones most in need of confirmation. The pope receives some of the very best medical care in the world, far better than billions of other people. This medical care is based on the best science available. Why doesn’t the pope require his Christian beliefs to be subject to the very same scientific scrutiny as the medical beliefs of his doctors? Why don’t we require that his bulls and encyclicals receive the attention of the best science available—es18

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pecially since they affect billions of humans and other animals? Why don’t we insist that science establish the truth of claims such as “God exists,” “Jesus loves us,” “The world is an illusion,” “There is one, true deity and his name is Allah,” “I am saved,” “I am a buddha,” “Sin exists,” “There is a heaven and a hell,” “I cast a circle,” “Coyote is a trickster,” “Humans have souls,” “We are reincarnated after death”? We all know the answer to this question; even the most fanatical religious believers know the answer: science would establish that every single one of these claims is false. The physicist Heinz Pagels wrote: “there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no evidence for a will or purpose in nature that goes beyond the known laws of nature.”4 This, now, is the heart of the clash between science and religion: religion makes factual, usually supernatural claims about the universe, about our world, that science refutes. The power of science is well summed up by the American mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). He writes: To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect. . . . Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.5

If science and some religions differ on, for example, how old the Earth is, and there is only “one True conclusion,” then science is in possession of it, and doubt is both welcome and assuaged because science’s methods are public and repeatable, whereas religion’s are not. But this is only the beginning of the story. As we will see in chapter 10, adherence to Real Things and the One True Conclusion, contrary to what is widely believed, undoes the commonplace world 19

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completely . . . for everyone, scientist and traveler alike. Still, Peirce’s view of science is definitely in the ballpark. Reason and experience (and experiment, which is just a way to control and manipulate experience) do lead to very plausible, very useful conclusions, and none of them supports the supernatural claims of any religion. But the clash between science and religion is deeper and more dangerous than a dispute over facts (though this is deep and dangerous enough). The power of science is also what causes people to fear it. Science seems to make the world utterly banal, common. Science dashes hopes, renders us all alone in the universe, and puts the burden for our continued existence squarely on our shoulders. The legacy of science seems to be simply this: That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.6

That’s it. That’s all science would seemingly tell us (although science wouldn’t supply the value judgment about despair). And we all know this, just as the pope does, so we don’t invite science to confirm our religious claims, preferring instead to keep our science and religion separate; religion is too important, apparently, to let it be upended by science. If you know your mom isn’t going to let you have any cookies, there’s no point in asking her, especially if it is really important that you have a cookie. This is the main reason why science and religion are required to occupy different realms in human life. They both claim to discover and establish truths, but when the truths are of the same kind 20

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(ontological, factual truths), which happens often, science wins every time . . . thunder is not caused by Thor wielding his hammer, and there was no worldwide flood, ever. When the truths are of different kinds (moral versus factual), relations seem to improve: science doesn’t usually, at least currently, offer advice on what’s moral and what isn’t.7 But maybe something else nonreligious can, like garden-variety rational thought. After all, many people observe that religion does a pretty bad job of saying what is moral and what is not. The Old Testament, for example (and this is just the tip of the iceberg), tells believers to kill homosexuals, naughty children, and people who work on the Sabbath (see, respectively, Leviticus 20:13; Deuteronomy 21:18–21; and Exodus 31:15). (We will return to the independence of morality from religion in chapter 7 and the issue of keeping science and religion in different realms in chapter 9 when we discuss Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal for “nonoverlapping magisteria.”) The fully rational person would at this juncture abandon any spiritual quest. And as we have seen, many do this, with smiles on their faces. It is because of this that religion gets tagged as irrational. Science is rational, religion is not. Rationality is good, it is to be embraced. So religion is to be eschewed. But obviously for billions of humans, that is not possible. As rational as the rationality argument is, it is not compelling for many. Why is that? Some scientists (and some philosophers) tend to think our drive or need to be spiritual or to engage in spiritual practices is entirely psychological at the personal level. This sort of explanation has been around awhile, going back to Freud (see his The Future of an Illusion). The most modern and robust form of this idea more plausibly locates our need for spirituality in a human psychology whose first and foremost characteristic is that it evolved. Hence, we travel a spiritual path because our ancestors who did this sort of thing survived better than those who did not. Why? Perhaps spirituality and religion helped knit our clans, tribes, and societies together by indoctrinating us with a moral, ethical sense both for dealing with members of our group and for dealing with outsiders. Religions, according to this explanation, gave us group membership, which helped us survive on a difficult planet; they also gave us a sense that our group or tribe was special, gave us a sense of history and belonging, and they gave us a sense that our lives matter.8 (We will return to this topic in quite a bit of detail in part 2.) 21

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It seems, therefore, that well over one billion people eschew religion because none of religion’s claims is public and repeatable. At least, that is a big part of the reason. One billion people do not reject science. Indeed, almost no one rejects science. There are those who, à la carte, reject, sometimes angrily, portions of science (evolutionary theory is the well-known example). Others, of course, are ignorant of aspects of science. But very few reject outright all of science, saying that it is a complete sham and a conspiracy. In fact, there are very few people who are even agnostic toward science. And even fewer reject the foundation of science: rationality (how would they do so? . . . would they have rational reasons for their rejection? . . . would they use reasons at all? . . . if they did, they’d be, in some minimal sense, behaving rationally). I don’t mean to suggest here that the existence of the One Billion is due exclusively to science, though if science is broadly construed, this claim is not as far-fetched as some might think. It is easy to imagine one of the builders of Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids being a robust doubter of his or her local religion. Such a person would doubt for basically the reasons we see today in the One Billion or in atheistic scientists: there is no good evidence, and any alleged supernatural truths don’t seem to matter much. It is irrelevant to such doubting whether or not the person knows that the sun is a large fusion reaction or thinks that it is some hot thing in the sky, alleged by his local priests to be the god Ra.9 The One Billion, then, tell us something. They tell us that all religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs, are rationally doubtable. This can be made stronger. They tell us that religious beliefs are rationally ignorable. Stronger still: the One Billion may be telling us that our spiritual journeys and religious quests have a perfectly natural, scientific explanation (a topic of part 2). So, the One Billion are important. They tell the rest of us that it is far from obvious that our journeys and quests are real.10 And finally, the One Billion are flesh and blood examples of what all travelers of any stripe already know: all spiritual beliefs, every one of them, exist under constant attack from external reality . . . from the facts. Let’s now leave the One Billion for the nonce and turn our attention to the six billion—the majority of us who are spiritual travelers of one sort or another. Though the journey may not be real, we, as travelers, certainly are real. And this reality has a special edge to it. 22

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comprise two rather separate dimensions: an ontological one and a moral one. First, spiritual claims make commitments as to what exists, what kinds of things share the universe with us—the unseen part of the universe. These existence claims are always nonnatural (because they are supernatural, see the section above where “religion” is defined). That is, they are claims about what exists beyond the natural realm, beyond our ordinary world of tables and chairs and people and plants and animals. Second, spiritual claims also demand moral commitments, and these moral commitments require certain behaviors from us, they demand certain allegiances and require certain virtues (which behaviors, allegiances, and virtues are required change with each religion and frequently within each variant of each religion). This is one of the things that makes UFO-ology not a religion: it doesn’t carry any claims about how we should behave toward one another, toward nonbelievers, toward the rest of the planet, toward the UFOs even. It merely states that space aliens have visited (and maybe still are visiting) Earth (a claim, by the way, for which is there no decent evidence at all, sorry to say, for discovering that we are not alone in the universe would be momentous). Both the moral and ontological dimensions can be deep and profound separately, but the real excitement—as well as difficulty—begins when they work together. The fact is that any spiritual journey requires a third, further thing from us that is a blending of the ontological and moral dimensions: we are supposed to, we are morally required to, we ought to . . . believe (or believe in) what our religion says exists. We are required to believe the claims our religion makes about the structure of the world, both its seen and its unseen realms. We are required to believe that Thor and Mjölnir create lightning and thunder; we are morally supposed to believe that there was a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago. And we are morally required to believe first-order moralities: for example, within the fundamentalist Abrahamic religions, you are morally required to believe that homosexuality is immoral. This blending has three serious consequences. First, it makes believing in the religion itself a moral matter. Second, it ties religion and morality together. And third, it affects what counts as proof of the religion. Let’s discuss these three in order. All members of modern religions are supposed to behave in certain ways toward their fellow humans (and, very often, toward everything ALL SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS

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else, living and nonliving, on planet Earth). Usually, fellow believers are accorded one kind of behavior (based on being included), and nonbelievers are accorded a different kind of behavior (based on being excluded).These moral rules for behavior are coupled very closely with the rules for believing a particular religion’s ontology. The result is that it is not only factually wrong to disbelieve in the existence of the god of the Christians, say, but morally wrong as well. What is true for Christianity is true for every major religion: disbelieve that religion on pain of some sort of terrible consequence due to one’s being immoral. (Importantly, not all religions evangelize, but all think that being nonreligious is wrong. For some of these, conversion is therefore left up to the individual, and converting can be done with little or no formal process [for example, Hinduism or Wicca]. Other religions discourage converting, preferring instead to accord membership to members of a certain ethnicity. For example, to practice the Navajo religion or Judaism, it is best to be born Navajo or Jewish. And yet, many of the religions discouraging converts nevertheless hold that nonmembers are somehow benighted, diminished, or inferior in some way. Seems rather unfair, doesn’t it? This “country-club” attitude is arguably one of the main reasons for the existence of religion: religion implements humans’ deep need to draw Us versus Them distinctions. We will examine this in detail in part 2.) Not believing in, say, the Christian deity has moral consequences beyond just those associated with nonbelief. To many, religion and morality in general are linked. Lying is immoral not just because society seems to say so, but because God says so.This is why meeting an avowed atheist is so disconcerting to many people. An atheist is often seen as someone outside the moral boundaries of society: if atheism is true, there is no morality—so the thinking goes. A very disquieting thought, to both theists and atheists alike, interestingly. (Ivan Karamazov, a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, is the recognized embodiment of such thinking, for he believed that if there is no god, then everything is permitted. We will question this in chapter 7.) Third and finally, the moral dimension of any religion is so deep that adherents cannot let the mere fact that science disproves all of the ontological dimension to be a bar to their belief. The proscriptions against homosexuality, abortion, divorce, eating meat, and so on are so important to some that all the evidence in the world that their god 24

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doesn’t exist is easily discounted and explained away. So, we arrive at an important conclusion: the very best methods of inquiry and confirmation (science) cannot be used for one of the dimensions of spirituality (the ontological one) because the other dimension (the moral one) is of such vast importance. We get, therefore, this eye-opening result: The reality of the quest, of the spiritual journey, is substantially based on its morality. The quest becomes real because something real is going to be demanded of us. We will have to really not lie, to not be selfish, to not have sex or eat meat, to have sex daily, to use or not use a condom, to give away 10 percent of our hard-earned money, to have parts of our bodies chopped off or to scar or pierce them, to move out of and destroy our home if someone dies in it, to kill and die. These are real things. Some of them are designed to improve us (where “improve” is strictly defined within the religion), but self-improvement takes a lot of work and is often extremely difficult. Doing these things, therefore, only makes sense if they are part of some sort of robust reality. And for many of them, that reality has to be profoundly gripping. Ordinary reality is not usually considered profoundly gripping (an attitude we will come to reject in chapter 10). Hence, the reality sought by spiritual travelers has to be transcendental. This is precisely what the ontology of every religion supplies: a transcendental realm, as real as—or more real than (preferably)—the physical world and your own body. But can anything transcendental be real?

I F T H E J O U R N E Y S A R E N O T R E A L , at least according to the One Billion, but we travelers are real, we have a dark recipe for anguish.That all spiritual beliefs live under threat of this anguish results in what I call the siege mentality of the spiritual traveler. Even the most benign spiritual belief exists in one’s mind completely differently than one’s belief that, say, one has a mother and a father, or that one eats food and breathes. Even those who are completely sure of their spiritual or religious beliefs get their beliefs bruised and battered when they clash with the much more solid beliefs of ordinary reality. But worse, one’s spiritual beliefs often get destroyed when they crash head on into the much more solid and depressing facts that people get sick, people experience pain and suffering, and innocent people die. I’ve had many a Jew tell me that belief in Yahweh is impossible after the Holocaust.

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So our religious, spiritual beliefs exist uncomfortably with the rest of our beliefs. Of course, this uncomfortableness goes both ways. In many people, their spiritual beliefs exist as sort of second-class citizens in their minds. The first-class citizens are the ordinary beliefs about tables and chairs and people and governments and so on. Yet, there are many for whom the opposite is the case. Their spiritual beliefs are primary and occupy a position of privilege in their minds, while their beliefs in tables and chairs and governments have a secondary status. But the message is the same in either case. Spiritual beliefs exist apart from all of our other beliefs. Our religious, spiritual beliefs have a different epistemic status, as philosophers say—a different status as (alleged) knowledge in our minds. For example, as we have seen, we do not subject our religious, spiritual beliefs to the same scrutiny that we do our other beliefs. If you think you might be developing late-onset diabetes (type 2 diabetes), you go a doctor, an expert, and let that person conduct tests, form different hypotheses, and eliminate those not supported by the evidence. You do nothing of the sort if you think that you are developing a special relationship with Jesus. (There is one peculiar exception to this, which doesn’t change things one bit. We do often test our religious beliefs, after a fashion. I’ve had many Christians tell me that they’ve tested their god, only to find that he is there, after all. Here’s one story told to me by the actual participant. In a small, western US town, a Christian woman, rushing to the hospital to see her failing father, asked God if he was real, and if he was, to reveal himself to her. He did. And so she prayed in her car to him to spare her father long enough for her to get to the hospital to see him. How did God reveal himself to this woman? Though she was in a hurry, and speeding, God arranged things so that she wound up behind a slow-moving truck, which stayed in front of her for miles. She did in fact make it to the hospital before her father died. It is hard to see how being behind a slow-moving truck is evidence of God at all. I asked the woman about this, and she explained that she was being taught patience by God. To give an example from another religion, I’ve had several Wiccans tell me that they had tested their spells to see if their religion was the right one. A Wiccan priestess told me she cast a spell to find money. She didn’t need the money, she was just checking to make sure her religion worked. She did indeed find money: she found many coins on the sidewalk, and then . . . mirabile dictu . . . a five-dollar bill . . . in 26

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Monopoly money. One can legitimately wonder if the Christian god or Wiccan magic passed these tests. Perhaps being behind a slow-moving truck was a coincidence. Perhaps finding the money also was [though I think one has to admit that if there is a magical mechanism governing a witch’s spells, it clearly seems to have a sense of humor]. Humans are not good at handling coincidences, and have a powerful tendency to see patterns where there aren’t any. We will discuss this in some detail in chapter 5, and especially in the appendix to chapter 5.) And now, finally, to return to those troubling One Billion, or at least a sizable subset of them, those refusing to take up a seemingly dubious quest, who sojourn in skepticism. They are the physical embodiment of our doubt. Of course, there are those spiritual travelers who don’t doubt. They are not blessed; they are benighted—and dangerous. And the size of their danger dwarfs their numbers: the nondoubters, who never doubt their religion, are a minority and are far and away responsible for the greatest evils of religion. But most of us travelers do doubt. And if that doubt causes profound anguish and suffering, it is also what keeps us human and connected to humanity . . . by reducing our arrogance. There’s a well-known name for this doubt in Christian theology. It is called the dark night of the soul.

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The Traveler’s Dark Night of the Soul

O N E O F T H E M O S T W E L L - K N O W N spiritual travelers of the twentieth century, the Catholic nun Mother Teresa, was also one of the most darkly conflicted. Though she labored long and hard for the cause of the sick and suffering in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, she herself was bereft of the spiritual presence of Jesus Christ. Her life was, shockingly, one long crisis of faith—the kind of deep crisis St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul. Mother Teresa wrote: “In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist” and “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains” and finally, “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”1 She didn’t feel the presence of God. Why? Did God just ignore her? That seems cruel. As we will see in this chapter, the Bible recounts a much crueler act . . . made even worse because, as with the case of Mother Teresa, it is impossible to distinguish the intentional cruelty of the act from the random, unintentional cruelty of nature. One might well wonder what the difference is between a cruel or capricious God that doesn’t reach out to someone like Mother Teresa and no God at all. Though the extreme nature of Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul is surprising, everyone knows that the spiritual traveler will suffer at least one such night. The traveler’s way is difficult and burdened with hardships unique to such a quest. Demons and spiritual dangers

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loom in the shadows, but the most dangerous and most frightening of these demons is doubt. Beset on all sides, eventually everyone falls face first into the Slough of Despond (the infamous swamp from John Bunyan’s influential Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678). The temptation to stop, to abandon the journey, is strong. Many do abandon it. As we’ve discussed, science is one the main culprits here. Of course, science—scientific truth—was not always the demon it is today.Worldly temptation held that spot for most of history, and still does for many travelers (this is a major theme in Pilgrim’s Progress). But no one can deny the problems public and repeatable truths, the bedrock of science, have caused modern religion. Such truth causes doubt. Doubt causes anguish. Anguish derails the quest. Awash in doubt, we often succumb to the voice that says: “Give up the quest and the anguish will cease.” Science-caused doubt is now gigantic simply because of science’s successes. But as much of a danger to spiritual fulfillment as science is, the biggest demon today by far is statistics, or rather, the reason for statistics. Statistical doubt dwarfs even science-caused doubt, for statistical doubt is far more ubiquitous, as we will see. All of us are the beneficiaries of a robust and sweeping science. But more importantly than this, we are the beneficiaries of a statistical and probabilistic view of the world. And our spiritual quests are its victims.This chapter is about how the statistical, probabilistic worldview besets us latter-day pilgrims, causing trials and tribulations that are different and far more formidable than those besetting pilgrims of former times.

W E B E G I N B Y E X A M I N I N G an act crueler than what God did to Mother Teresa: the Bible’s story of Job. Both Mother Teresa and Job provide outstanding examples of how the dark night of the soul is caused by witnessing randomness in the world. What finally happens is that a capricious and cruel god becomes indistinguishable from bad luck. To see this, we next consider the unlikely magical being Santa Claus. Using him, we will see that all spiritual travelers have to have a split personality, they have to live in two realms: the mundane and the spiritual. The problem of what to do about randomness, however, is everyone’s problem. Even the One Billion have to come to terms with it. They, too, suffer a similar split of having to live in two realms: a more

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or less nonrandom, rational one and a random one. Next, we look at the epistemic and philosophical foundations of this split. This will show how deep the split runs and why it is so upsetting. From this vantage point, we will be able to see how having to deal with the world’s randomness causes the statistical and very dark night of the soul.

O N E O F T H E B E S T (and oldest) books in the Bible’s Old Testament confronts the issue of randomness versus capricious deity head-on. The book is concerned primarily with unjust bad luck: why do good people suffer? This is the central question of the Book of Job. (This question is also, importantly, called the problem of evil. In the next chapter, we will couch this question as how to “justify the random, even evil ways of God to humans.”) The question of the good suffering is of course much more pointed in the book, since to its writer (or, more probably, writers), the Hebrew god obviously exists and is all powerful and not evil. Indeed, Yahweh perhaps is at least sometimes just and caring. So, now, why do good people, innocent people, suffer, given that the universe is ruled by an all-powerful, nonevil god? Specifically, why did Job suffer? Job is a wealthy, pious man living in the land of Uz. But Satan thinks that Job’s piety results from his successes in life, which have been bestowed and protected by God. (Satan is most decidedly not the Christian Devil, but is rather an esteemed member of God’s divine court. The Bible, or at least the Old Testament, is clear about this. It reports in the Book of Job that Satan comes and goes as he pleases, for example. Satan is, in fact, God’s cosmic prosecutor—think of Satan as God’s attorney general.) Satan points out that it is easy to be pious when everything goes your way. Satan then suggests to God that Job would lose his piety were all Job’s riches and joys destroyed. To prove otherwise, God hands Job over to Satan. And Satan makes Job’s life a living hell (to use a phrase). Job loses nearly everything: his sons, his cattle, his health. Job, of course, on top of all his other suffering, is quite confused as to what is going on. He considers the idea that he wasn’t pious enough and hence had to be punished by God. But he rightly rejects this. Job also toys with the idea that God is his enemy. A notion that has some credence, obviously, since we, the readers, know that God gave Job to

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Satan just so Satan could test him—clearly not the behavior of a friend. So, Job sits there, covered in boils, ashes, and dirt, suffering, bereft of most of his friends and family (who have been killed by Satan or have abandoned him) and his livelihood (as mentioned, his cattle have also been killed), wondering, Why? The writer of the Book of Job cannot just shrug and say, “Randomness . . . the world is like that” because, then as now, this is darkly unsatisfying (which is not to say that it is not true). Also, it would imply that God doesn’t exist, a thought unthinkable by the writer of the book. It is self-evident to the writer that God exists. But it is impossible to reconcile the idea that God is an all-powerful, all-good, nonevil being with Job’s tragically wrecked life. God has to be all powerful; otherwise, what’s the point of God? So, the writer instead kisses off justice and goodness: God is king, period. He can do whatever he wants. Furthermore, his ways are mysterious to us. So we’d better not pout, we’d better not cry. And we certainly better not criticize. Does the writer of the Book of Job actually explain the reason why good people suffer? No, of course not; he doesn’t know (and he won’t accept randomness). He basically says, “It’s a mystery. God is a powerful king who rules by caprice, and you can’t complain because God is also touchy, vain, and overly sensitive.” So, in fact, and without knowing it, the writer of the Book of Job does say that randomness is the essence of the universe. It is Holy Randomness, to be sure, but it is randomness all the same. Blessed be the name of our god: Randomness.2 We are now at a scary place. A God-King who rules the universe by caprice is no different from no king at all. Being good and pious cannot, in the end, be counted on to bring rewards. Being evil and nasty cannot, in the end, be counted on to produce just retribution. Statistically, yes, being good has its rewards, though they often seem small. Driving while sober usually results in your getting to your destination, but only usually. And this returns us again to those one billion unaffiliated people. A good many of them probably believe that a god compatible with the randomness of the world is no god at all. The parts of the universe that aren’t random, that are rational, are the very parts we understand, through hard-won scientific struggles with Mother Nature to unlock her secrets. We clearly don’t need any god for that. All of that hardwon knowledge is due to our own brilliant and valiant doing, our own 31

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success. God is for the irrational and random parts . . . the days like September 11, 2001. But, almost by definition, any god that cannot make the irrational and random parts of life go away is no god at all. A god of chance is just chance. A loving god compatible with chance is just chance. This is precisely what at least some of those one billion humans believe. Life has its ups and downs. Believing in a god in the face of this brute fact is meaningless . . . a waste of time. . . . And more than a little crazy. Or maybe there’s something else going on.

in a god and a religion that are not real, no one. And the reason (as we saw in chapter 3) is that something real is going to be demanded of them. Even children who believe that there is a Santa Claus believe that he is real; they believe in Santa Claus.3 You can’t put your trust in something you believe is imaginary, even if you are a child, for trust is real, and trust requires something real of us. A discussion of the stages in Santa Claus belief will give us a template for understanding the arc of any spiritual journey. So, to begin: When I was eight years old, I discussed the important Santa Claus matter with a friend of mine. I had figured out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. My conclusion (and it was a conclusion) was based on the fact that Santa Claus’s existence didn’t accord with everything else I thought I knew about the world. For example, how can reindeer and a sleigh fly? And even if they could, I knew that the fastest jet or rocket couldn’t visit every house in one night. I sadly told my friend, “Santa Claus doesn’t exist.” My friend said, “He does so, I saw him.” That would of course be definitive—if true . . . “Where?” I asked. “At the shopping mall,” he said. I knew then that he hadn’t seen him. For two reasons. I, like many children, had sat in the laps of many a shopping mall Santa. Nothing more than ordinary observation was required to reveal that they were men just like my dad dressed up to look like Santa Claus. Second, I knew that around Christmas, Santas were at all the shopping malls, and more places besides (for I watched TV). Santa Claus was one person. He traveled extraordinarily fast on Christmas Eve, but even he couldn’t be at two (or more) places at once, nothing could—I knew that, it was part of what I had learned about the world. When I pointed all this out to my friend, he got mad and went home. NO ONE WANTS TO BELIEVE

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Now I was mad, too, and sad. I went to ask an authority: my mom. Like every child, I considered my parents decent authorities on most matters and ultimate authorities on some matters. “Mom, is there a Santa Claus? I don’t think there is.” She smiled, I remember, and said, “No, there isn’t. We put the presents out after you’ve gone to bed. But please don’t tell your sisters.” A mom-confirmed truth—which was a certification beyond all possible doubt. I never told my sisters. Shortly after my Santa enlightenment something unexpected happened: confusion set in. I didn’t understand why I was sad and angry. Before I figured out that there was no Santa Claus, the world contained tables and chairs, dogs and cats, and Santa Claus. That was just the way the world was. If I wanted a Space Robot for Christmas, Santa brought it. No big deal. After I figured out there was no Santa, the world contained tables and chairs and dogs and cats. That was just the way the world was. If I wanted a Space Robot for Christmas, my parents bought it using money. No big deal. So I shouldn’t have felt sad and angry— nothing substantial had changed. But here I was sad and angry. I had to puzzle over this for quite a while. The first thing that I discovered was that I wasn’t sad the way one would be if one’s dog had died, or one’s pet lizard. I also wasn’t angry the way my friends and I were when Chuck’s older brother took back his bats, balls, and gloves right when we were in the middle of a game. Both of my feelings were tinged with a kind of resignation, as if I had always known that the nonexistence of Santa Claus was a real possibility. But I hadn’t always known that. It was something about growing up and the falling away of childish fantasies. One was expected to lose them—like baby teeth. Of course, Santa Claus and the like weren’t childish fantasies before we lost them. Before we lost them, we couldn’t point to our fantasies and say: “I’m going to lose that one as soon as I grow older,” for we didn’t know which were the fantasies and which was reality. Precisely the opposite of baby teeth: Mom was very accurate in pointing to which tooth would be lost as a result of getting older. Then it came to me: the feeling of resignation came from possessing the truth. Truth is like that: it gives one a certain power over the ecstasy of the fantastic. Truth pares away the strange, the fanciful, the exotic. But as we noted in chapter 1, truth is a slippery thing, depending as it does on interpretations of facts. The “fact” that truth is slippery will be our central concern in part 4, where we will see truth open 33

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the fantastic and the strange for us to experience. But for many, truth seems to make the world banal. Another name for truth, recall, is the cold, hard facts. The facts are cold and hard because warm, soft fancies of the imagination are destroyed.Truth gives one a new power over things: the power to be bored by them. Such is the power of truth that when something fantastic is eliminated by it, that thing changes, morphs in our memory into something that, we now claim, merely had utility for us in the past. It is then discarded like an orange peel; it used to be useful, but now it is useless. Truth not only gets rid of wonderful things, it changes their history, too. We come to believe that they never really were wonderful, they were always the objects of confusion. But before the morphing in our memory, the fantastic thing was not merely useful, it was much more than that—it produced the giddy joy of the weird, it thrilled the imagination. Truth, therefore, is revisionist: it not only flattens your present, it flattens your past, too. Santa had fallen to the scythe of truth. “Oh well.” I shrugged. “I never really believed all that stuff, anyway.” And I moved on. . . . Almost. The second thing my puzzling revealed was that as I approached the time of ascension, the time of “Knowing the Truth About Santa,” the transition wasn’t abrupt. Shortly before Santa was eliminated by truth, but quite a bit after he ceased to be a part of the ordinary world that only a fool would deny, he became quite strange, different from the other inhabitants of reality. And he thereby became exciting. That something so strange could actually exist and would actually bring me a Space Robot was very appealing. My sadness and anger came from this in-between time, and not the time before this, when I thought that Santa had the same existence status as my parents. I wasn’t sure how long this time had lasted. Possibly as long as a couple of years. So, as I was turning nine, I concluded that there were three stages of believing in Santa Claus. Stage 1: The world is the kind of place where someone can fly in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Such a being would of course bring toys to children. Stage 2: The world is the kind of place where sleighs and reindeer cannot fly. But it is also a world with magical corners, out-of-the-way places that contain special things—special sleighs that could fly, for example . . . and who knows what else. 34

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Stage 3: The world is the kind of place where flying sleighs and reindeer are impossible. It has no magical corners, and no rotund, magical being brings toys to children. Perhaps my Santa Claus experience is the experience many Santa believers have. Perhaps not. But the experience does look like it can be turned into something like a recipe for describing the arc of a spiritual journey, especially the failed kind. Before one begins one’s journey, the world is just the ordinary, everyday world. Then as one starts out, one has no doubts: deities of various sorts are just part of the furniture of the world. Then one realizes that the ordinary world really is most of the world. There are small corners, oases, of spirituality here and there, and the journeyer tries to sojourn within them and travel quickly between them. But they are small, indeed. Then one realizes that the spiritual oases are mirages. They don’t exist. The world is, and has always been, flatly natural—just the ordinary, everyday world. And then the journey is over, not having reached its goal, having fizzled instead. Most religious types, most journeyers whose journeys haven’t fizzled, live at stage 2. They drive ordinary cars that burn ordinary gas to get to an ordinary building on Sundays (for example), where they can have, it is hoped, an extraordinary experience. Then they go back to their ordinary home and finish up their ordinary Sunday with, perhaps, an ordinary football game. We branch out of the ordinary for the extraordinary, but only in small time increments. Most of the time, even the most religious among us are completely ordinary. We might envy those who never come back from the spirituality of the extraordinary (which we might classify as stage 1.5, say, rather than stage 1, because in stage 1 the spiritual realm is the ordinary one—one talks to God or Santa Claus just like one talks to one’s friends), but we don’t really want to be them—we’ve got to go to work on Monday to earn some money to pay all the bills. God certainly isn’t going to pay them . . . no god will, not even Juno Moneta—the Roman goddess of money. In fact, some of us are a bit afraid that we might wind up permanently in the realm of the spiritual, never able to be ordinary. We are afraid because frequently such people are labeled as crazy, as having a mental disease of some sort. Yes, some of these people are necessary to keep religion edgy and otherworldly, and hence alive, but not many constantly ecstatic journeyers are needed and certainly we don’t want to be one. Besides, what if they really are just crazy? And besides all of 35

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that, no one really likes prophets, whether they are men and women of the Christian god or work for Apollo at the Oracle at Delphi—look what happened to St. Stephen and all the rest of the Catholic martyrs. Crazy or reviled—the two choices life in the spiritual world has to offer. Better to remain mostly ordinary—or even completely ordinary, and just go through the motions, faking it. So, most of us spiritual travelers combine living in the ordinary world with briefly visiting the extraordinary, spiritual one. Sort of like having a house in town and a cabin in the mountains or by a lake for special weekends. For most of us, our spiritual journeys consist of going to the mountains for the weekend to refresh and renew ourselves for the daily grind down on the flats. That really isn’t much of a journey, is it? One can easily imagine a drug that would accomplish the same thing (such a drug is important in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: soma, the wonder drug: “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”). Hence, for many, their spiritual journey could be better traveled if a drug was used instead of genuine spiritual seeking. But this can’t be right, can it? Something is clearly amiss here. (Terence McKenna [1946–2000], a well-known ethnobotanist, advocated spiritual journeying via the use of hallucinogens, but this is quite different from advocating using hallucinogens in lieu of such journeying.) I am certainly not insulting the spiritual retreat, the cabin-in-themountains approach to spirituality. If that works for you, great. In fact, in many ways, it is the most honest approach, for Juno Moneta really won’t pay the bills. Consider anything else that is typically considered noble or special or even just fun, from fighting in a just war, to art, to music, to sports of all kinds, to sex, to gardening, to doing philosophy and high-energy particle physics—no one can do any of these constantly. One does them and then returns to the ordinary world. With all of them, one returns refreshed and renewed, but one does have to return. There are aspects of Buddhism, especially Zen, that teach seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary . . . buttering bread, for example, or making tea. But most people find the trip-to-cabin approach much easier and much more practical. And they are upfront about this. Hence, the honesty. The bind here is really tight. Look again at stages 1, 2, and 3. Stage 1 looks like the stage to live in if one wants to be truly spiritual. But one cannot live at stage 1; the difficulties of the world intervene 36

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too much and are solved, when they are, by ordinary means. Loved ones get sick; Santa doesn’t help; so, doctors have to be called. Mundane medical research comes to the rescue. But stage 1 has a worse liability. There is an important sense in which it is not spiritual enough. If Santa Claus or God exists just as surely as your parents or friends, and you can communicate with either effectively (writing a letter addressed to the North Pole, praying), then where’s the extraordinary? Where’s the otherworldliness? The glimpse of the infinite? The Holy? The communion with the mysterious sacred? No, stage 1 clearly won’t do. And of course stage 3 is out—it represents a failed journey.The only stage that works for the spiritual traveler is stage 2. But stage 2 commits us to living two lives: an ordinary one where bills have to be paid while children and dogs are fed and cared for, and another one, tucked into the corners of the world, where we hope to experience communion with the sacred, if only briefly and minutely. And, finally, stage 2 can really only work if it is not a stage. One has to live there. One cannot sojourn at stage 2, on the way to stage 3. So, it appears the spiritual traveler lives in two realms, lives two lives. Each traveler is split in two, each side facing in a different direction. In one direction is the spiritual realm, however it exists for the individual traveler. In another direction is the mundane world, the world the traveler shares with all other humans and inhabitants of Earth, the world of bills, sick children, and ordinary duties and responsibilities. The issue underlying the need for the two realms is reliability. Praying for healing doesn’t work nearly as frequently as penicillin or chemotherapy. But more importantly, it doesn’t work nearly as reliably. It wouldn’t matter if praying only worked 10 percent of the time, if it could be counted on to work that 10 percent of the time. What really matters in life is reliability. As we’ve seen, this is one of the bedrocks of science. The truths of science are based on reliable, repeatable evidence and experiments that are open and can be challenged by anyone. All spiritual realms lack this reliability. So, though we pray for a deathly sick child or spouse, it is also important—indeed, crucial—to seek the best medical care in the ordinary world.To repeat a point made in chapter 3, the pope gets some of the best medical care available, perhaps supplemented with prayer, but he does not rely on prayer exclusively. Spiritual unreliability takes many forms, and some are far less dramatic than the failure of prayer, but cause far darker nights. One cannot 37

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even count on just experiencing the holy in some religious ritual. From Easter services to Summer Solstice rites, experiencing the sacredness of the event, the moment, or the place sometimes comes and sometimes does not. So, though we live in two realms, even when we are completely within the spiritual realm, immersed in some ritual or other, we cannot count on the spirit moving us, speaking to us, communicating with us, filling us, touching us, or appearing to us. This, I think, causes the darkest night of the soul. Never mind trying to cause the forces or beings of the spiritual realm to cross the boundary and heal our dying child or spouse or keep our loved one safe, . . . even restricting our selves to merely experiencing the sacred, we are not guaranteed any such experience. The sacred is as unreliable as prayer. This, then, is the fate of all spiritual travelers: a dark night of the soul caused by the unreliability of the spiritual realm; a dark night of the soul caused by having to live in two realms, the spiritual and the mundane. But being split is also the fate of the One Billion. Their two realms are the arational (not the irrational) and the rational. So it doesn’t matter whether one is a spiritual traveler or not. One has to deal with a world in which only some things happen for understandable reasons. In this sense, everyone has a dark night of the soul. We now turn to discussing these two new realms, the arational and the rational, in some detail.

T H E R A T I O N A L R E A L M I S W H E R E things happen for understandable, sometimes even predictable reasons. Jones got the flu because his wife had it. She got it at the office, where three people had it last week. The sun reappears every morning, seeming to rise, because the Earth spins on its axis. The corn is ready to harvest in September because it was planted in May in a well-cared-for field and nurtured with rain and sun. Polly flunked the math test because she didn’t study for it. The bowling pins fell down because they were hit by a rapidly rolling bowling ball. Things are constantly happening, and a lot of them make sense. That is because there is an order or pattern to them. If we didn’t live in a universe with ordered patterns, nothing would make sense, and science would be impossible, of course; but worse, such a universe could not harbor life—all life, even bacteria, requires some order. But life also requires some randomness. Life cannot adapt to changing environments unless there’s some slop in the system. Evolu-

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tion would be impossible without randomness. There’s an interesting sidebar here. If the universe were static and had life in it already (never mind how), life would not need randomness—there would be no need to evolve at all. A static universe need not be devoid of processes in general: a static universe could contain exactly repeating processes that never decayed. But the trouble is that a static universe would never produce life in the first place. Our universe is not static—far from it. Hence, to continue to live in the universe, life must change to its advantage. That is what evolution is really all about. Also note that the question “could there be a static universe with life in it?” might seem to have a “yes” answer: the Christian heaven is often defined as such a place. However, it is not static either, as those lucky enough to die in grace enter it from time to time, changing its population. However, randomness definitely has its downside, to put it mildly. John gets lung cancer suddenly and dies at the age of sixty. Why? He wasn’t a smoker; no one in his family smoked; he worked in a smokefree environment; he never worked around asbestos or any other known lung carcinogen. What’s going on? The doctors shrug and cite . . . probabilities and statistics, the last form of “knowledge” before complete chaos takes over. A lot of things are like this—they happen for no discernible reason. Polly flunked the math test even though she studied hard. The world is like that. And this is a sad fact. This sadness exists even if Polly’s mom wins the sixty-million-dollar state lottery. Winning the lottery makes her happy, of course, but its absolute randomness discombobulates everyone—from Polly’s mom to those reading about her win in the newspaper. This sad fact runs deep, for probabilities govern everything.4 Sixty-five million years ago, life on planet Earth was romping along merrily. Plants flourished; insects droned; dinosaurs cavorted (though this probably doesn’t quite describe the snarling hunting of Tyrannosaurus rex or the mad fleeing of his or her prey). Dinosaurs were the dominant large animal. There was a five-toed mouse-like mammal running around eating bugs, but it was insignificant. Then for statistical “reasons,” a large asteroid slammed into Earth in what is now the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, forming the Chicxulub Crater. The Earth was engulfed in cold and darkness caused by the vast, globeencircling dust cloud that resulted from the collision.The sun was gone. This thick darkness lasted for at least many months, possibly as long as 39

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several years. Around the globe, plants and the animals who ate them died rapidly. Then came the deaths of the predators. Lastly, the scavengers died off, too. And the dinosaurs were gone. In all, something like 60 percent of the existing species at that time went extinct—plant and animal. That’s a lot of death. But guess who didn’t die? Guess who could cope with the cold? Guess who could eat some of the remaining 40 percent of the species that lived? That’s right—the five-toed mouse-like mammal. The significance of its having five toes per paw is that is how many toes, and fingers, you have, for this creature is you, sixty-five million years ago. This creature is your great great . . . great grandmother. So what was a spot of rather bad luck for the dinosaurs was great luck for the mammals. And ultimately, great luck for you. Hence, randomness divides into what we call good luck and bad luck, as well as a third category: unjudged randomness. Most things that happen for no discernible reason are neutral with respect to being good or bad . . . think of a leaf falling in the autumn: why that leaf, and why did it follow that trajectory? Randomness makes even good luck disconcerting. Since you are never sure when you will receive some, you can’t count on it and you can’t make it happen (in spite of folk “wisdom” to the contrary). And randomness makes bad luck even worse, since there’s no tried and true way to avoid it; in fact, bad luck happens even when you try to avoid it. (Just because you don’t smoke doesn’t mean you won’t get lung cancer: around 8 percent of male lung cancer patients have never smoked and 20 percent of female lung cancer patients. No one is sure [of course!] why the two numbers vary so much.)5 Randomness represents loss of control. And without control, good and evil cannot be made sense of, to the point where perhaps they don’t exist. And this is a terrible predicament. Randomness has troubled us since we became human.6 The fundamental problem is that randomness is deeply at odds with our basic human understanding of the world, and even more deeply at odds with how we feel the world is. We must explore this, and to do so, we again need to delve into philosophy. This topic makes up the next section.

G O T T F R I E D L E I B N I Z ( 1 6 4 6 – 1 7 1 6 ) , the great German philosopher and mathematician, formulated and subscribed to a principle underlying human optimism about what we can know, about what is know-

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able. The principle is the Principle of Sufficient Reason: “There must be a sufficient reason [often known only to God] for anything to exist, for any event to occur, for any truth to obtain.” And, “The fundamental principle of reasoning is that there is nothing without a reason; or, to explain the matter more distinctly, that there is no truth for which a reason does not subsist.”7 Most humans feel, deep in their innermost being, that for everything that could have been different, there is a reason why that thing is the way that it is and not some other way. Usually, we accept that frequently the reasons are not deep because the event is not very significant: “This leaf fell when it did and the way it did because of its mass, its shape, its position on this tree, the wind, and the nature of gravity.” The leaf could have fallen a different way at a different time, but it fell this way, here and now. Even if we have to add an “et cetera” at the end of the list of reasons, we are certain that the “et cetera” can be cashed in for real reasons: this leaf fell as it did because of its mass, its shape, its position, the wind, gravity, et cetera, where the “et cetera” allows for details like a bug on the leaf that increased its weight and affected its aerodynamics. We also usually accept that we will never know the exact details that fully explain why something is the way that it is. The leaf fell where it did because of the details of the relevant physics, but we will never know these details, and we don’t worry much about that. We simply believe that the details are there to be known, if only to God, as Leibniz says.8 As Leibniz pointed out, God is the backstop for the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We may not know the details, but God always does. That God knows shows that the details, the reasons, are, in fact, knowable. The poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) put this very well at the end of “Epistle I: The Universe,” from his Essay on Man: All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good. And, spite of pride, in erring reason spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

One of the most important ways in which our belief in the Principle of Sufficient Reason manifests itself is in our belief in universal 41

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causation: everything that is has a cause. Causation is fundamental to our understanding of the world. This is very unfortunate because we humans know nothing about causation. Of course, we know the specific causes of many, many things—this is one of science’s fortes—but there is no accepted, robust, general theory of causation.We don’t know what it is that all cases of causation have in common. Here’s proof of this rather surprising claim: philosophers work on causation and have been since before Aristotle. If philosophers are working on something, especially for a very long time, then you can be assured that the thing is a stone cold mystery. Causation is a stone cold mystery. Consider: we say that a bowling ball hitting bowling pins causes the pins to fall down, the moon causes the tides, fear of governmental registration of handguns causes people to buy handguns, fear of an approaching hurricane causes people to rush out and buy groceries, hatred of the United States caused the planning and carrying out of the September 11 attacks, not brushing your teeth causes cavities, smoking causes lung cancer, love causes sacrifice, the backlash against the presidency of George Bush caused Barack Obama to be elected president, news about housing causes the stock market to go up (or down), human consumption of fossil fuels is causing climate change, my love for my dogs causes me to buy them toys, and so on. All of these are cases of causation, but what do all of them have in common? They must have something in common, but it has proved extremely difficult to explain what that thing is.9 To make matters worse, science tells us that universal causation is wrong. Causation goes away completely at the quantum level. Events at the quantum level are not caused and are instead governed solely by probabilities (it was this fact that prompted Albert Einstein, who hated quantum mechanics, to say, “God does not play dice [with the universe]”). And the Big Bang was, on most theories, uncaused . . . it just happened. That such things are uncaused or acausal only makes matters worse, for now we have to explain what causation is such that it goes away at the quantum level, and such that the universe itself was uncaused. So, humans by and large believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As a corollary, they also believe in universal causation. But causation is not universal, and where it is known to exist (above the quantum level), it is not understood. And the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be meaningless if God or some such ultimate knower couldn’t know all the reasons of which we are woefully ignorant. 42

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But we are not crazy to believe in the Principle, at least as a heuristic. And non-quantum-post-Big-Bang causation is very useful, indeed required, even if we don’t understand it. So, if we modify our beliefs, if we believe instead in the Heuristic of Sufficient Reason (“very often there is an understandable reason for what occurs”) and in non-quantumpost-Big-Bang-somewhat-universal causation (“many macro events do often have a discoverable cause”), then our beliefs will at least be true, if not comforting. But such modification, such compromise, comes with a cost: the dark night of the soul. For coming to understand the unmarked limitations of both the Principle of Sufficient Reason and universal causation makes us sophisticated and wise, and world-weary and disenchanted. We can now hardly be spiritual travelers anymore, innocently searching for God. We have now looked at two general cases where we humans are required to compromise our deepest beliefs about how the universe operates. If we are religious, we have to compromise and live in two worlds: the mundane one and our religious one. If we are not religious, if we are a member of the One Billion, then we still have to compromise our belief in a rational universe and accept the fact that important parts of the universe are arational: some things happen for a reason, and we can often understand that reason, but some things appear to happen for no reason at all, or if there is a reason, it is beyond our reach. The best we can do about such seemingly uncaused events is collect statistics on them. Some things, some important things like life and death, just happen some percentage of the time. That’s all we can know. The effect of this compromise on our spiritual travels is huge: no religious realm is reliable; no god, no prayer, no magic can be counted on when the chips are down. But even for the One Billion, the effect is huge: there is no Principle of Sufficient Reason and no universal causation. There are only the compromised versions of each. So here we all sit, covered in boils, ashes, and dirt, wondering, Why? Only now we know that often the only answer to this question will be statistical: “because things like this happen some percentage of the time.” Thus, our statistical and very dark night of the soul.

W E A R E N O W R E A D Y for some conclusions. As we saw in chapter 3, people test their religion every day, just as they do various laundry

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detergents or toothpastes (but importantly, not as scientists test their hypotheses). People ask the relevant god (Jesus, Jehovah, Krishna, Changing Woman, Diana) to deliver. Usually nothing big is requested. Usually, the supplicant merely asks for a sign . . . a sign of existence, a sign that the supplicant is on the right track, headed in the right direction. If randomness enters here and a flower blooms, a sunbeam hits a piece of glass, a baby hiccups and seems to say, “Hi, Mom,” a comet appears (never mind that it shows up every seventy-five years), then the supplicant is satisfied and feels that she’s touched the transcendent. It is crucial that the supplicant not ask for world peace, or for a cure for cancer, or for a just solution to our world population problem. These will not be provided, and every single religious person knows this to his or her very core. Yes, I know, every priest, minister, rabbi, imam, monk, shaman, and high priestess can rebut this observation with much cleverness and misdirection. Undisclosed cosmic plans are the most common form of apology for a world that continues to suffer from profound and dangerous conflict, from diseases, and from the blights caused by overpopulation. But, seriously, how convincing is such an apology? And anyway, the vast majority of believers believe without such an apology, or at least without putting much weight on such an apology. We arrive at our final station. We do not ask enough of our gods. We can’t. Perhaps they aren’t even there, for they are indistinguishable from chance, from statistics. This is why Mohandas Gandhi’s famous quotation is famous: “Be the change you seek in your world.” This puts the responsibility for improvement squarely on our own shoulders, which is where it belongs, for our shoulders, like we ourselves, do exist and are available to carry (or to attempt to carry) the burden. Unlike any deity. Do you doubt for a second that if you could be god-for-a-day you would instantly put a stop to all the sexual assaults that occur each minute around the globe? In spite of all the pain in the world, and in spite of one billion nonreligious people professing indifference to religion, most humans remain religious, and many are deeply religious. And humans have been religious since we first appeared (as perhaps have other species in the genus Homo—Neanderthal graves have been discovered that were adorned with offerings such as flowers, talismans, and amulets). So, clearly, something is going on. It is not just that in the face of no evidence, people believe in God or embrace their religion. It is far stronger 44

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and hence far stranger than this. It is that in the face of overwhelming contravening evidence—the deplorable abundance of badness and evil in the world—humans not only continue to believe in good, caring gods, but actually increase the strength of their beliefs in such gods. Nothing helps a religion more than bad news.10 So, as we sit here suffering our dark night of the soul, it is time we asked a pointed question: why are we religious; why do we believe in God, gods, angels, and demons? We can’t use a religious answer to this question, for it will be indistinguishable from chance. Our question is a scientific question: given that we believe in the face of no evidence (for statistics explains the occurrence of what we take to be evidence), why then do we believe? This takes us into the evolved psyche of the human mind. Here is a preview. In chapter 5, we examine the recent scientific attempts to explain religion as just another natural, biological aspect of being human. In chapter 6, we explore the psychology and evolution of morality. Seeing morality as the result of natural processes removes its need for religious support. And in chapter 7, I demonstrate two ways of having morality without religion. By the end of part 2, religion— all of it—will look like a bit of our evolved psychology, and unlike a mother’s love for her children, this aspect of our psychology perhaps has outlived its evolutionary usefulness—just like our love for fat and sugar. Our love of fat and sugar was crucial to our evolution; all of our recent evolutionary ancestors required fat and sugar in their diets in part to sustain their large brains, which required lots of energy. But this was long before the emergence of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. Now our love of fat and sugar has become a dangerous gustatory addiction, threatening the health of millions. Just so with religion.

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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 4

Statistics and Probability Meet Job

H E R E A R E A F E W F A C T S about statistics and probability as they bear on religion and spiritual matters. Most of us meet statistics and probability when we first play games of chance. Any game with dice counts, for example, Monopoly. But baseball, football, bowling, and the like are also games of chance for, just as with the dice, we cannot exactly control what is going to happen.We meet statistics in a more serious setting in the doctor’s office. I’ve had more than one conversation with a doctor that went something like this: “We don’t know the cause of your medical problem, but 56 percent of the population gets this problem. We usually treat this problem with drug D, and drug D works 90 percent of the time; we don’t know why it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. Since only .01 percent of the time does D seem to cause the bad side effect S, you should take drug D.” Thus we learn to live with randomness. The good thing about statistics and probability is that they reveal that most randomness is not really random, in the sense that there’s no discernible pattern whatsoever. There is a pattern to almost all events. It is this pattern that is captured by statistics, and it is this pattern that makes statistics required, for the pattern almost always includes exceptions. If something occurred 100 percent of the time, we wouldn’t need to use statistics to track its occurrence, but almost nothing occurs with certainty—in fact, many philosophers, statisticians, and probability theorists think that we should get rid of the “almost”—nothing occurs

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with certainty (that is, with a 100 percent probability), not even tomorrow’s sunrise. (There is a potential paradox here, or at least self-defeat, for if we could prove that nothing occurs with certainty, then we’d be certain of one thing: that nothing occurs with certainty.) The relationship between the actual occurrence of something and the exceptions is what is captured by statistics. So, statistics and probability are used for the vast number things that occur somewhere between always and never. There is, however, a bad thing about statistics: their indifference to individuals. One’s chances of dying in an automobile accident while driving from New York City to Denver, Colorado, can be calculated. But the calculations don’t reveal whether or not you will die in such an accident, only what your chances, as a typical driver, are. When statisticians say “your chances,” they don’t mean the specific you, the specific person you are. They mean someone of your general type. Statisticians can’t particularize. This is crucial. What makes statistics and probabilities work is that detailed particularizing information is excluded. Probabilities and statistics are derived by looking at populations of events or individuals. By definition, these populations are collections of individuals whose individuating factors and properties are ignored. For example, doctors say that the chance that a male in the United States will develop lung cancer during his life is about one in thirteen. This statement derives from just focusing on males in the United States. It includes, for example, both smokers and nonsmokers. So this difference is ignored. So is whether or not the male worked around asbestos. So is whether or not the male was a good father, a veteran of the Vietnam War, a priest, a musician, president, or a cancer researcher. For another example, you might be an incredibly reckless driver who always has a six pack of beer on the seat next to you as you drive, so your chances of dying driving from NYC to Denver might be much higher than average. But even here, a statistician can give you statistics and probabilities: “A person who is an incredibly reckless driver has an 80 percent probability (say) of dying in an accident driving from NYC to Denver.” Nevertheless, the statistician cannot say whether you will die driving from NYC to Denver. All that can be said is what the chances are of someone of your type, someone who belongs to the same relevant population or category that you do. Statistics and probability suffer from another liability. They cannot tell us the chance of something unique occurring. In fact, they cannot 47

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tell us the chances of something very rare occurring. Anything that is far enough outside the relevant norm—an extreme outlier—is essentially unpredictable. When such things are significant enough, they are called black swans.1 The term “black swan” is a sort of metonym derived from the history of the discovery of black swans. Europeans used to believe that all swans were white. They believed this until the surprising discovery of black swans in Australia (the first swans were seen, apparently, in the late seventeenth century, but weren’t described by English naturalists until the late eighteenth). The Internet, the rise of the personal computer, and the September 11 attacks are examples of black swans. So is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Black swans can be either good or bad. But their most important property is their unpredictability. Statistics are pretty much useless for predicting them. So, the events that shape our lives seem to come in three categories: (1) statistical, (2) truly random, and (3) genuinely caused and understandable. Chapter 10 includes an exploration of some very beautiful black swans produced, oddly, by science.

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PA RT T W O

The Biology of Religion, the Psychology of Morality

The Persistence of Religion A P P R O X I M A T E LY E V E R Y T W O M I N U T E S , someone in the United States is sexually assaulted.1 This is a profoundly distressing fact. You’d think it would be a life-changing one as well, for this fact is directly at odds with a certain widely and strongly believed conception of God. God is most often considered to be a being who knows about these sexual assaults, knows that all sexual assaults are morally wrong and so wants to stop them, and can stop them easily. So, why do they occur? That’s the not question, however. The real question is why when informed of the frequency of sexual assaults, the beliefs of the devoutly religious are not affected one bit—their beliefs persist in the face of this fact without so much as a mild eyebrow raise. Knowledge of the frequency of sexual assaults is completely powerless against religious beliefs. This is the fact that needs explaining. And the frequency of sexual assaults is just the tip of the iceberg. How can religious belief be so strong that humankind’s darkest horrors have no effect on it? This is the question that needs answering.2 The powerlessness of the sexual assault fact is hard to overestimate. Believers in God are not even disappointed in . . . well, Him.Why? Oddly though, the reaction is almost the opposite if you tell robust religious believers that they are a species of African ape. This fact does affect religious people—strongly. It doesn’t affect the strength of their beliefs,

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just as with the sexual assault statistic, but they are far from nonchalant about the African ape fact. Tell any religious person they’re an ape, and you’ve got a fight on your hands, especially in the United States, where only 40 percent of the population understands and accepts the theory of evolution (the percentage might be as low as 32 percent), while a mirror image 40 percent believe that evolution never happened and the theory of evolution is completely false—with the exception of Turkey, this the largest percentage of evolution deniers in any country in the entire Western world (the remaining 20 percent answer “Don’t Know” when asked whether they accept evolution or not).3 Now we have a new question. What explains the difference in behavior between a religious person being told she is an African ape and that same person being told that someone is sexually assaulted in the United States every two minutes? What explains the fact that the first are “fightin’” words while the second barely elicits raised eyebrows? We can answer this second question with a famous B-movie line: This time, it’s personal. Telling a religious person about the assault statistics gives them third-person knowledge of a fact. That fact can be quarantined safely since it is not about them personally. But telling a devoutly religious person that he or she is an African ape is telling them something about themselves—it is giving them a first-person fact with which to wrestle. That’s much more threatening and much harder to quarantine. But this doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. Both responses—the ho-hum response to the frequency of sexual assaults and the vitriolic attacks on evolutionary biology—actually stem from a common source. Clearly, there can be only one explanation for these behaviors: religion is in our genes.

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FIVE

Justifying the Ways of God to Man via Evolution

T H E T R A V E L E R ’ S L O N G , D A R K N I G H T of the soul, a night full of horror, evil, fear, and trembling, resulted in our wondering whether travelers should take a different approach to justifying God’s and the other deities’ decisions and behaviors regarding humankind and all the other life on planet Earth. Instead of worrying over why the various gods of the various religions allow children to suffer and die of leukemia, of child abuse, and of war (to name just three evils), perhaps we should wonder why we believe in deities in the first place. Perhaps the gods behave as they do not because they are there and mysteriously letting untold evils befall us, while stingily, and apparently randomly, meting out benefits, but because we imbue the godless world with them, for reasons that are less mysterious . . . indeed for reasons that are accessible to science and rationality. In this chapter, I will present an evolutionary theory of the existence of religion. Its main consequence will be that religion is a natural human phenomenon like learning and speaking a language or like making music.The theory I will present is a combination of two well-known theories, the first proposed by a biologist-cum-anthropologist, David Sloan Wilson, and the second proposed by a philosopher, Daniel Dennett.1 It doesn’t matter, here, whether the theory is true or not—figuring that out has to be left to the biologists, psychologists, and other scientists. Rather, my goal is to offer a plausible and scientifically credible account of why humans practice religion—an account that is completely

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godless, goddessless, spiritless, magicless, demonless, an account devoid of the supernatural, and account that is flatly naturalistic. Once such an account is on the table, we will be able to see how religion could be the creation of a species of African ape, rather than the other way around. And that will remove the problem of squaring the existence of any deities with randomness, evil, suffering, and misfortune—with the traveler’s long, dark night of the soul. But of course it won’t remove the problem of randomness, evil, suffering, and misfortune.

peoples of the Earth have a religion. No culture has ever existed that had no religion at all. Atheists have probably always existed. That is, within any given culture, or tribe even, as far back as one can go, there probably were always some who doubted the truth of that culture’s religion, preferring instead to believe in what they could see, feel, and understand. But, interestingly, no culture of pure atheists has ever formed. Each religion also breaks up into many sects—groups with the same general beliefs, but that have very different particular beliefs (and that often hate one another more than they hate members of completely different religions). There have been tens of thousands of different religions and sects (or more) practiced by various groups of humans over the course of human existence. Today, some scholarly estimates of the number of currently practiced religions range as high as ten thousand.2 These are different religions, not sects or subgroups of one religion.3 All of this is just the kind of phenomenon that cries out to biologists for an evolutionary explanation: something important that an entire species has, but that varies considerably from place to place. Consider an apt analogue—language. All people speak a language— no matter how isolated. Indeed, speaking a language is considered a hallmark of being human. Language evolved from communication. All living things communicate—yes, even plants, fungi, and all the other eukaryotes and prokaryotes. But only humans use language. At least that is the current view. The parrot, dolphin, and chimpanzee language studies conducted so far suggest that parrots, dolphins, and chimps don’t have, and aren’t capable of, robust symbolic language. And even when expressly taught (which is laborious), these animals grasp only the most T O B E G I N , N O T E T H AT A L L

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basic symbols.4 If all human peoples have a language, if language is universal for our species, then it likely had a role in human evolution. But even if speaking a language is central to being human, languages are bewilderingly diverse—in their grammars, their pronunciations, their written forms, and their cultural rules. Some languages are cousins of one another (for example, English and German), and some are quite distantly related, if related at all (for example, English and Navajo). So, biologists, anthropologists, and linguists naturally wonder why language evolved, how it functioned in human evolution, how it functions today, and why there are so many different languages. Given the diversity of language, it is clear that no one language is “the best.” All are good. Hence, whatever language bestowed on humans that enabled them to compete well in the evolutionary game must belong to all languages and must transcend the diversity of languages. The same is true of religion. Religions exist in all cultures. There is a bewilderingly diverse variety of religions. That fact alone strongly suggests that no one religion can be “the correct religion.” Hence, no one religion can be “the best.” So, whatever religions bestow on humans has to belong to all religions, it must transcend the diversity of religions. What could that be? All human groups, from families to small tribes to vast nations, are groups of humans. That truism doesn’t seem like a very deep point, but it turns out to be crucial. Making a group out of some collection of humans turns out to be the key to our evolution, and yet it is somewhat difficult to forge a group of humans out of some collection of humans. Families can be destructive, tribes fall apart, and nations disintegrate— no one group of humans has lasted for any considerable length of time. So anything that could help hold a group of humans together is obviously going to be selected for via evolution. Perhaps all religions, no matter what their particular beliefs are, help hold groups of humans together. That, in any case, is David Sloan Wilson’s theory in his highly regarded book Darwin’s Cathedral.5 The idea is that religions are both a glue, helping to hold groups of humans together, and a lubricant, helping to keep friction between group members to a minimum. Wilson’s theory about the usefulness of religions in forming groups of humans is part of a larger theory of his that groups of organisms (of any type) that cooperate (for whatever reason) will tend to out-compete

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organisms that don’t cooperate.6 He calls this theory group selection theory. The larger theory is very plausible (though it is not without its scientific detractors, of course). Virtually all organisms work better in groups. This is a dominant theme in evolution on our planet. Lichens are the Platonic Ideal of this. Lichens are composite organisms formed from organisms usually classified in two different kingdoms(!): fungus and algae. In fact, your own body, a vast collection of different kinds of cells working hard together for the betterment of one another, is a testament that working as a group is the best way to get along in life. Of course, humans have and our immediate ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis, had big brains—the biggest on the planet, measured in terms of encephalization quotient (in their respective times). Beliefs and ideas matter to members of the genus Homo (this, arguably, is what big brains are for). So, getting humans to stick together in groups is going to require systems of beliefs and ideas, or at least it is a good strategy to use. Furthermore, the sense of belonging is enhanced if there is something that makes membership in the group special. Consequently, some mechanism is needed that encourages cooperation, discourages cheating, provides remedies when cooperating breaks down, and makes everyone in the group feel special for belonging to the group. This mechanism should use ideas and other psychological phenomena to proscribe certain behaviors (for example, lying and stealing) and to encourage certain other behaviors (telling the truth, respecting others’ property, and sacrificing for the group), and it should bring the group together under some sort of psychologically compelling umbrella. Religion is almost made to order for this . . . because of the supernatural. All religions rely on supernatural phenomena to both encourage and enforce certain behavior as well as to bring people together (chapter 6 will explore the behavior-controlling aspect of religion in detail). Hence, it is quite plausible that religion, as a group-forming or group-bonding mechanism, would have evolved as humans evolved—indeed, religion could have helped humans evolve, which is what Wilson contends. There is, however, a dark side. A consequence of Wilson’s group selection theory is that groups of humans will tend not to get along with other, competing groups of humans—to put it mildly. Evolution apparently selects for in-group fidelity in part by selecting for outgroup hatred: nothing says loyalty like being willing to kill, or die, for 54

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your group. And being willing do that requires hating other groups and their members. (His theory seems to explain altruism, too, which is a within-group way of helping the group.)7 So every time you take one for the team, even by flying a plane into a building, you are participating in humankind’s ancient evolutionary heritage. And again, religion is very useful here: many religions posit some sort of afterlife, especially for heroes (and all forms of afterlife are supernatural, by definition). Still, as robust as Wilson’s religion-as-group-glue theory is, it can’t be the whole story. The central problem is that his theory doesn’t fully explain why it has to be religion and not just club membership that does the work—why does there have to be something supernatural? While it is true that religion is made to order for Wilson’s theory, many weaker, yet natural, methods of group-making also suffice, methods that don’t rely on the supernatural. So, again, why religion and not club membership? Lots of human groups are very cohesive and enjoy deep loyalty, yet have no supernatural component at all. Take (US) football teams. Here, every man has a job to do, the jobs are interlaced, and everyone has to execute correctly, or the whole team suffers. Many football players and their fans are loyal to extremes. Of course, the extremes are usually within the bounds of social acceptability, but that still leaves a lot of room for such things as large tattoos; naming children after favorite players, mascots, or whole franchises; refusing to eat anything but beans and franks until your team wins the Super Bowl; and so forth (of course, the players are very well paid, so their loyalty is at least partly bought). No one is much willing to die or kill for football teams . . . in the United States. In the United Kingdom, they often are: football fans have been known to riot in that and other parts of the world—harming, maiming, and sometimes killing one another (they play a different kind of football there—the ball is apparently round, but it is hard to believe that could explain the difference in intensity level). Yet, even in the United Kingdom and certainly in the United States nothing supernatural plays any serious role in the football culture. (Many US football players dedicate each touchdown to their favorite god [usually the Christian god], but they will tell you that their god isn’t really helping with the game, but rather they are honoring their god.) Beyond football, universities, colleges, and clubs of many types have very loyal followings; many people spend their lives in service to these institutions. But there is nothing supernatural going on. Nothing 55

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otherworldly is worshiped and there are no institutionalized appeals to the supernatural. All these cases demonstrate that profound group loyalty can be had with either no or at most a minimum of religion. Yet it is a fact that no dominant culture, no flourishing tribe or nation, has achieved its success without religion. A country like the United States probably couldn’t be built relying solely on the group-bonding mechanism of American football or the local country club. So, religion seems needed, but why? What do community clubs or sports franchises lack? The answer appears to be that doing something very serious and important requires more from us than clubs can secure. As we discovered in chapter 3, when something real, some real sacrifice, is going to be demanded of a people—and such a sacrifice is always going to be required when the group’s survival is at stake—religion is the best mechanism to ensure that the sacrifice gets made. (Many militaries of the world are good examples of this: they have some religion at their core.) Thus religions are needed. Both the supernatural and the holy work together here to command a profound respect for the supernatural, holy forces that unite the group, and to instill a sense that the sacrifice is worth it. One way this latter is achieved is by giving everyone, especially the sacrificing group members, the feeling that their sacrifice is being observed and well judged by someone or something that matters more than any individual. But now we have another problem: how do religions get started? Granted that they are needed because something difficult and real is being demanded of the religion’s people, but being needed is no guarantee that something will evolve or emerge. On the assumption that the genus Homo is the only one ever to have religion, explaining how religions emerged turns out to be a central problem. Wilson’s theory doesn’t explain this. Enter philosopher Daniel Dennett and his theory. His theory focuses much more on the psychology of experiencing the “supernatural” than Wilson’s theory does. Dennett’s goal is to explain why we humans form religions rather than country clubs. His excellent book on the subject is titled Breaking the Spell.8 Dennett’s theory is best presented in steps. As a prelude, first note something very interesting: humans recognize faces all over the place, not just on creatures that actually have faces.We see faces in the Moon’s 56

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surface, in clouds, in leaves, on tortillas, on dinner plates, in crab shells, and in basically everything else. Why? A good explanation is that humans are hardwired to recognize faces—we do it automatically.9 But why are humans hardwired to recognize faces, so much so that we overrecognize faces? Carl Sagan once pointed out that a plausible explanation is that such hardwired overrecognition has survival value for human infants as well as adults.10 So, basically, Sagan was hypothesizing that evolution favored those protohuman infants who found as many faces as there were to find—their mothers’ faces, their fathers’, their aunts’ and uncles’, and so on. And a very good way to guarantee that all these faces are found, and smiled at, is to have a face-recognition mechanism that is very sensitive to the shapes that make up faces. To anthropomorphize, it is as if Mother Nature (aka evolution) took the view that “when there is the least reason, assume that what you are looking at is a face.” The result of such face-recognition hypersensitivity is that one will recognize faces on all those who have them and sometimes on things that don’t, like trees. Now for Dennett. Dennett pointed out that humans do far more than merely recognize faces.We recognize agents. And we are very good at it. Too good, in fact. Just like faces, we seem to find agents everywhere. An agent is any intelligence that has knowledge and goals and acts on them. Scientists who study animals (cognitive ethologists) don’t know definitely which animals are agents and which aren’t, but it is clear that the collection is large. Almost anything with a brain is an agent. Almost all humans are agents, of course (the only exceptions being those that are infants, or are severely brain damaged, or have something like severe autism). Dogs and cats are agents (all mammals are, actually), birds, reptiles, octopi, cuttlefish, and so on. These are all agents. Nonagents perhaps include most of the rest of the invertebrates (worms, beetles, fireflies, and mosquitoes, for example, although it is known that many types of worms can learn, so it isn’t clear that any of these should be excluded), as well as, maybe, all plants (though, again, there is disagreement about this, some plants seem to know to help those plants around them that they are related to).11 So humans overrecognize agents; that is, we tend to think lots of things are agents that aren’t. For example, we assume that a snap of a twig in the woods is caused by some agent (a bear? a wolf? another 57

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human?) moving in the woods and (accidentally?) stepping on a twig. Why would we overrecognize agents? Again, as with faces, overrecognizing agents (that is, recognizing too many of them, recognizing agents when there aren’t any) is the best way to guarantee recognizing all the agents one should recognize. It is better to automatically assume the twig was stepped on by, say, a bear and be wrong than to ignore the snapped twig and be eaten by a bear, or a wolf, . . . or Hannibal Lecter. It isn’t important to identify the predator as a bear or a wolf or another human, it is only important to flag the snapped twig as indicating the presence of an agent of some sort (a predator, in this case). Dennett notes that our recognizing agents is automatic, very quick, and not open to conscious deliberation. Recognizing an agent is not like thinking and figuring out how to solve a problem, it is more like perceiving and recognizing a color or a melody. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that all behaviors of ours with the above three properties—being automatic, very quick, and not open to conscious deliberation—are caused by specific but small areas of the brain. Dennett dubs the relevant part of our brain as the hyperactive agent detection device.12 All mammals probably have agent detection devices. For example, a deer will perk up its ears and look around when it hears a twig snap. Most animals will respond to noise of various sorts as if it were caused by some agent best avoided. This is just sound policy. It is better to stop foraging or eating and see if that sound was the prelude to something dangerous than to keep eating, oblivious, and become someone else’s dinner. Dogs and cats have such devices. My dogs often bark ferociously at rustling leaves, moving shadows, tall clumps of grass, oddly shaped tree stumps, and so on. Better to bark and be ready to defend oneself than to be attacked and killed by surprise. Dennett points out that if you have ever cursed a machine (a computer, say) or cajoled your old car on a cold morning, you have been a victim of your hyperactive agent detection device.13 This is an interesting reminder that we humans are today thinking with brains that evolved a couple hundred thousand years ago. Dennett’s next ingredient is our penchant for unusual but memorable combinations.14 Examples include a talking tree, a flying carpet, a jinni in an oil lamp, a hammer too heavy to carry (except for one person) that returns to that person when thrown, a reanimated person 58

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made out of the parts of dead people, a spinning wheel that turns straw into gold, an ordinary-looking guy with spider powers, a woman’s arm rising out of a lake holding a sword. These and thousands more like them are weird things that have grabbed our human imaginations down through the ages. There is a strong competition for our imaginations, and most combinations people dream up lose out, weird or not. Such combinations are either too silly (a reanimated person made entirely out of recycled noses) or too complicated to remember (a hammer that broke every time you threw it, but then reassembled itself into a new hammer every other day, except during a leap year [this one might also suffer from silliness]). Those combinations that somehow strike the right balance (and also have a bit of luck) are the remembered ones. Next we need to add in our penchant for explaining what we experience.15 We need a name for this, so I will just call it the explanationgenerating device. Both explaining what we experience and being able to remember interesting combinations are easily understood on evolutionary grounds. We live on a complicated planet, and our big brains make our human world even more complicated. Having an explanation of something helps us to control it and reduces its complexity. And being able to remember certain interesting explanations (which are always combinations of some sort) is just part of basic learning: it is required so that we don’t have to dream up explanations over and over again for the same experience or phenomenon. But like our hyperactive agent detection device, we tend to overuse these two, and, more importantly, we overuse them in tandem, producing and remembering interesting explanations that are really quite weird. So our explanation-generating device together with our penchant for memorable combinations results in our penchant for producing and remembering weird explanations.16 Dennett then combines the hyperactive agent detection device with our penchant for producing and remembering weird explanations and gets what he calls a fiction-generating device.17 This “device” is basically a storytelling system made with fixed, functional components: (1) the hyperactive agent detection device, and (2) our penchant for producing and remembering weird explanations (which is itself made up of our explanation-generating device and our affinity for memorable combinations). The fiction-generating “device” fabricates weird explanations involving strange agents as part of our general ability to explain events. I put scare quotes around the word “device” because 59

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the fiction-generating “device” isn’t really a neural or mental device in the standard sense. An analogy is a computer and printer together being called a “book-printing device.” The computer is a specific piece of hardware that sits on your desk. So is a printer. And together they form a printing device. But if you decide to write and then print a book, the computer and printer together briefly become a “book-printing device.” Finally, the fiction-generating device is the initial root cause of our religions. A quotation from Dennett will illustrate this: Every time something puzzling happens, it triggers a sort of curiosity startle, a “Who’s there?” response that starts churning out “hypotheses” of sorts: “Maybe it’s Sam, maybe it’s a wolf, maybe it’s a falling branch, maybe it’s . . . a tree that can walk—hey maybe it’s a tree that can walk!” We can suppose that this process almost never generates anything with any staying power—millions or billions of little stretches of fantasy that almost instantly evaporate beyond recall until, one day, one happens to occur at just the right moment with just the right sort of zing, to get rehearsed not just once and not just twice, but many times. A lineage of ideas—the walking-tree lineage—is born. (p. 120)

So, Dennett’s idea is this. Humans rather frequently experience events that need explaining, sometimes for survival’s sake, sometimes for curiosity’s sake, and always because we are hardwired to do so. Also, we are naturally hardwired to postulate (or see) agents almost everywhere. And we are naturally hardwired to like memorable (weird) combinations of things, especially when those combinations make an agent whose behavior explains something. So, we are naturally hardwired to postulate (or see) what amounts to supernatural agents almost everywhere. Every once in a while, one of these briefly postulated supernatural agents sticks in our memory long enough that it gets passed on to the others in our group. Voilà, a protoreligion is born. Dennett’s theory continues down a separate path, but we have what we need to offer a possible naturalistic explanation for religion. Let’s combine Dennett’s theory with Wilson’s.18 Notice how Dennett’s theory, unlike Wilson’s, can explain why we naturally gravitate toward supernatural explanations of events—the 60

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supernatural, in Dennett’s view, is made up of the memorable, weird combinations and explanations we invent, the weird agents and so forth we dream up. So, Dennett’s theory, unlike Wilson’s, can explain why we have religions and not just ordinary groups like gangs and clubs (which, as we noted, aren’t strong enough to work). But only Wilson’s theory can explain why we have merely thousands of religions for Earth’s inhabitants, and not almost seven billion and climbing (the current population of the Earth): we bond with those who like our weird agents, our memorable combinations, and we bond with those who have a weird agent we like. So belief in specific weird agents, like a tree that can walk, tends to glue groups together. And thus is born not just a lineage of ideas, as Dennett supposes, but the Walking Tree Clan, a Wilsonian group that out-competes other groups of humans whose nonreligious coalescing is too loose to sustain them through all the hardships that is life on planet Earth. Here, then, is my proposed theory. For very good evolutionary reasons, humans overrecognize agents: it is better to mistakenly recognize a nonagent as an agent than it is to mistake an agent for a nonagent (substitute “predator” for “agent” and this point will be obvious). Also for good evolutionary reasons, we have a capacity to produce interesting explanations. Again, we overuse this since underusing it would be bad for our survival, and it is next to impossible for evolution to fine-tune our use to just the right amount, so overuse is the norm. Finally, for good memory resource reasons, our memory favors memorable combinations, which can often be weird (since weirdness is memorable). The resource is the amount of memory and attention we can devote to the ideas and notions that bombard our brains every minute of every day. Since this resource is rather small, relative to the complexity of the world we live in, only those combinations that are most memorable, perhaps in a weird way, are remembered. Combining the production of interesting explanations with remembering weird combinations gives us our penchant for producing and remembering weird explanations (of course, not all or even most explanations have to be weird; indeed, most of them cannot be weird, since they have to be true [or true-ish] to be useful). Combining this with our hyperactive agent detection device gives us our fiction-generating device. This latter device generates weird agents and proposes that these beings are responsible for the strange, or even slightly strange, things that happen to us. Such agents 61

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are fairly called supernatural (though those dreaming them up might think of them as perfectly natural . . . to many, Thor was as natural as Erik the Red, the Norwegian adventurer who founded the first settlement on Greenland). Finally, weird agents are just the sort of thing that helps bind groups of humans together. This happens in two ways: weird agents promote a sort of secret but shared understanding of a group’s world that makes members of the group feel special (sacredness of course enters in here, too), and supernatural agents supply a sort of moral authority to the rules the group uses to help knit it together (this topic is covered in chapter 6). And any group that works well together is going to have a better chance of surviving. So religions helped humans out-compete other groups of primates and other mammals. I call this combined theory the Dennett-Wilson theory. If the Dennett-Wilson theory (or a similar theory) is correct, something interesting for our purposes emerges: A significant aspect of human religions is that they are a big coincidence. The Dennett part of the Dennett-Wilson theory suggests that the human perception of the supernatural is accidental—a side effect of other psychological mechanisms we humans have, which themselves were directly selected for during our evolutionary history. It will pay us to be rather precise here. Dennett’s theory says that the supernatural part of religion is a direct effect of our fiction-generating device, but that this hypothesized part of our brain is a side effect of three other parts: our hyperactive agent detection device, our love of weird combinations, and our explanation-generating device.These three were directly selected for in our evolution, at least so Dennett’s theory says. But their combination—the fiction-generating device—was a side effect not directly selected for. Here’s a simple example of this side-effect phenomenon. Your computer gives off heat simply because it is an electronic device. So, your computer helps heat the room it is in. Your computer, then, is a “room-heating device.” This is good in the winter, less good in the summer. The side-effect phenomenon is common in evolution. For example, the bones of your skeleton conduct sound. That is not what they evolved for; they evolved to support your body. But they conduct sound, nevertheless, by virtue of being solid. Often a side effect acquires another function and thereby becomes an adaptation on its own; this is how the bones used for hearing in your middle ear evolved. Bird feath62

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ers, however, are the classic example of this. Feathers originally evolved to help regulate the body temperature of the dinosaur ancestors of birds. Later in bird evolution, feathers proved useful in helping facilitate flight. Feathers didn’t evolve for flight; rather, their thermal regulating properties (holding air in place next to the body) co-occurred with other properties as well (being stiff and light, streamlining the bird’s body). It is the latter properties that eventually were used as flight evolved in birds. At that point, feathers directly adapted for that purpose, but they retain their temperature-regulating properties as well, to this day. The technical name for such indirect adaptations that become useful is exaptations. All exaptations are the happy coincidence of an accidental property finding a new, relevant use. The fiction-generating device is an exaptation. The Wilson part of the Dennett-Wilson theory says that once a protoreligion was up and running, its group-binding, group-facilitating properties kicked in. From here, the further evolution of religion in humankind was no accident at all. My suggestion, using the DennettWilson theory, is that the supernatural part of religion, generated by our fiction-generating device, is useful for knitting groups together, since it contributes to the members of the group feeling special by being members of the group, and it helps supply the religion with the moral authority it needs to enforce its rules of conduct. So, groups of protohumans with religions out-competed those that lacked them or that didn’t have robust enough versions. But the key to getting religions started—the key to their supernatural aspect—is due entirely to chance. This is interesting, as well as ironic, because a hallmark of religion is the denial of coincidence, at least in what are regarded as crucial cases. For example, if a parent prays over a sick child and the child gets well, this is almost never regarded as a coincidence.The appendix to this chapter is devoted to this topic of the role denying coincidence plays in the formation of religion. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it doesn’t really matter much for our purposes if the Dennett-Wilson theory is true (although, after reading the appendix, you will see that some theory like it is likely true). Here, I am merely trying to show one way that religion could be completely natural—a function of our evolved psychologies. It is very likely, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, that late in this century or early in the next one, evolutionary scientists will have a solid theory 63

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of the cause of religion that explains its properties, its role in human life, and why it persists. The very interesting thing to note here is that in the Dennett-Wilson theory, something natural, our evolved human psychology, explains why we believe the supernatural exists. The supernatural realm is reduced to the natural realm. So, as strange as any god is, he, she, or it is not strange enough—for he, she, or it is a figment of our imaginations. That god would be strange indeed who actually existed. In his epic poem Paradise Lost, the great John Milton invoked the Heav’nly Muse so that he might “justifie the wayes of God to men.” Sing Heav’nly Muse, . . . Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th’ Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men. (book 1, lines 6, 19–26)

The god in question here is the Christian god, which we’ll just call God. The reasons God’s ways need to be justified are the painfully obvious ones we’ve struggled with in earlier chapters: God is both all powerful and the font of justice, truth, and all things good. Intuitively, therefore, the existence of any such being is incompatible with evil. Yet evil exists. How to explain that brute fact is what Milton is up to in his poem. This is the very same problem the writers of the Book of Job wrestled with more than two thousand years earlier. Milton, being a Christian, invokes the Fall—Adam and Eve’s failing to do what God commanded them to do. So, bluntly put, you suffer because Adam and Eve screwed up. In the next chapter, we will discuss the morality of this (and morality and religion in general), but here we can now see that Milton invoked the wrong event. We now see how to justifie the ways of God to men: God is a figment of our, or of Christians’, fictiongenerating device. So of course he is incapable of preventing evil, just like Santa Claus is incapable of bringing any child a toy. It is all too easy to justify the ways of God to men: once we understand what God is, we see that God doesn’t have a way or manner of doing things that can be justified, for he doesn’t have any way at all. 64

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 5

Yes, There Really Is Such a Thing as a Coincidence

to find or imagine agents and draft these “beings” as explanations of everything from thunder to sunrise to evil have a flip side. Since we are agents, we think of the world as highly susceptible to our control. We think that things happen because of what we do. Again, as with all the other “devices” discussed in this chapter, we greatly overuse this. The first evidence that reasonably intelligent animals could fool themselves, or be fooled, into seeing nonexistent patterns comes from a series of psychology experiments. I begin with the seminal ones in 1948: B. F. Skinner’s famous experiments with pigeons. Skinner was one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century. He experimented often on birds, pigeons mostly, but his results, as will be seen, extrapolate to humans. Skinner’s “superstitious pigeon” experiment was simple.1 He placed a hungry pigeon in a box with a mechanical feeder that dispensed a pellet of food automatically every fifteen seconds. Intuitively, one would think that the pigeons would notice the regularity and just sit in front of the feeder and wait for the pellets—easy living. But that’s not what happened. After several minutes, each and every pigeon given a turn in the box had developed some “ritual dance” that seemed designed to make the pellets appear. One bird walked in circles, one bobbed its head, one stuck its head into one of the corners of the box. And so forth. HUMANS’ HYPERACTIVE ABILITIES

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Skinner claimed that all these behaviors came from the accidental pairing of some random act of the pigeon’s with the presentation of food. The pigeon then came to believe that its act caused the food to appear, and apparently that without that act the food wouldn’t appear. Note that the bird’s behavior had absolutely no effect on the appearance of the food. It showed up right on time no matter what the birds did. But the birds didn’t think of it that way. Skinner apparently refined the experiment into a powerful presentation. I quote Vyse: As part of a standard lecture, [Skinner] would bring a Plexiglas chamber [complete with feeder mechanism] into the classroom, place a pigeon inside, and start the timer. The class would watch for a few moments, observing the relative passivity of the bird at the beginning of the hour; then Skinner would cover the chamber with a cardboard box and continue his lecture. The buzz of the electrical feeder mechanism could be heard every fifteen seconds, but the pigeon was hidden from view. Near the end of the lecture, Skinner would remove the box to reveal the once-stationary bird now feverishly pecking at the floor of the box or engaging in some other seemingly senseless behavior. The demonstration was—and still is—a consistent crowd-pleaser.2

The reader might be thinking: “Yes, but those lovely creatures have bird brains—literally. The ‘superstitious pigeon’ experiment wouldn’t work on humans.” The same experiment works on humans. In 1987, Gregory Wagner and Edward Morris reported on an experiment they ran on children aged three to six. They put each child (one at a time, like the pigeons) in a room. The room contained a mechanical clown named Bobo, which dispensed marbles, and a separate box. Each child was asked to choose a toy they wanted to win. They were then told that the goal was to collect enough marbles from Bobo to win the toy; the collected marbles were to be placed in the box. The child was left alone in the room with Bobo, who dispensed marbles (from its mouth) at regular intervals. Wagner and Morris varied the intervals: some children got marbles every fifteen seconds, others every thirty seconds. The children were monitored through a two-way mirror in the wall of the room. For each child the experiment lasted 66

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for one eight-minute session a day for six days. Nothing the children did affected the rate at which the marbles were dispensed; nevertheless, 75 percent of the children developed robust superstitious behavior designed to elicit marbles from Bobo. Some stood in front of Bobo and made faces or smiled, some kissed or touched Bobo (especially on his face), others danced in front of him. These behaviors were repeated across the six days. Finally, the same experiment was run on Japanese university students by Koichi Ono. This was also reported on in 1987.3 College students are too old for Bobo and marbles, so Ono used a signal light and points tallied on a numerical counter. The students were told to accumulate as many points as possible by making the signal light light up. They sat at a table with three levers, a signal light, and the counter. The light and counter were set to various regular intervals, and sometimes the light and counter were set to light up and count randomly. Though they apparently believed otherwise, nothing the students did would affect how often the light lit up and the counter increased one point. Each student was experimented on for one forty-minute session. Again, most of the students developed a complex ritual of superstitious behavior designed to elicit points by making the light turn on. Most of the superstitious behaviors involved pulling the levers, but not all did. Some students climbed onto the table, jumped around, or touched other things in the room and other parts of the table. These experiments suggest that humans, and pigeons, are so keen to find ways to control their world, to find ways to influence the events in their lives, to solve the sometimes life and death problems with which we are confronted, that we greatly exaggerate the control we actually have. We see patterns of control everywhere—even where there is no control whatsoever. Swap out the points and the marbles and swap in a sick child. Imagine that someone prays to some deity when his child is sick. For many diseases, most sick children will get well on their own. So, probabilistically, sometimes when a father prays for his sick child to get better, that child gets better right after the prayer, and the father thereby feels his prayer was answered. He tells his neighbor, or his local shaman or priest, or the whole tribe. For those children that die, fanciful explanations are dreamed up which are intended to ameliorate the anguish of the death of a child (the agent device, overused again). And often, 67

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those explanations work: the grieving do come to feel better. Voilà—a religion is enhanced or supported or given greater credence. No deity. Just probabilities. Just coincidences. Praying, then, emerges as a kind of ritualized marble dance. We humans, it turns out, are rather bad at judging probabilities. We are so attuned to (evolved for) seeing patterns—from faces, to agents, to all kinds of abstractions—that we see patterns even in random events. We interpret these false patterns either as our ability to control something or as something’s ability to influence our lives. This aspect of our psychology explains everything from our being superstitious, to our using astrology, to seeing deep conspiracies everywhere (for example, the 9/11 conspiracy believers), to seeing religious miracles in random, coincidental events. But don’t be dismayed: it turns out that all animals with biggish brains—that is, all animals that easily find patterns in nature—are prone to this problem. Avians, mammals, reptiles, amphibians—all find patterns that aren’t there. . . . We all use the same way of getting along in the world. We must all be related. . . . Over the years, many people have told me that they don’t believe in coincidence. “Coincidences don’t exist.” The reason is that coincidences are ugly. It is much preferable to believe that the universe responds to your controlling efforts and that it, or some deity, knows you personally. But coincidences do exist. And it is important to accept this fact. Every time an important coincidence occurs, our fictiongenerating device kicks in, getting help from the group we belong to, and perceives an agent out there, behind the scene, manipulating events. The importance of the coincidence is inversely proportional to its status as a coincidence. The more important the coincidence is, the less it is seen as a coincidence. Yes, coincidences are out there—influencing our lives in small and big ways, but mostly by making us think they aren’t there. I’m reminded of something the French poet Baudelaire said, and which was repeated by Verbal Kint in the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Read “Coincidence” for “Devil.”

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B E Y O N D E X P L A I N I N G W H A T I S U N E X P L A I N A B L E , or what needn’t or shouldn’t be explained (for example, coincidences), the other important job of any religion is binding a group (tribe, community, and so on) together. This requires controlling in some way the behavior of the members of the group—at least to some large extent. A religion does this by laying down rules of conduct. In short, a religion supplies or backs the moral rules of a community, a group, a tribe, a nation. How religions do this, and whether or not it is right that they should do this, is the topic of this chapter.

to the chapter’s title question. For example, many Christians equate their deity with love (see, for example, see 1 John 4:8, 16); one doesn’t wish one’s loved ones dead. In fact, members of all religions can sincerely answer “no” to the title question by following certain well-accepted interpretations of their sacred texts. But such interpretations compete with darker interpretations. For example, in John 15:6, Jesus is reported as saying, “If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” Of course there are benign interpretations of this passage, and these are usually the accepted interpretations, but there are obvious threatening MANY WILL ANSWER “NO”

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interpretations as well: “Worship Jesus or burn in Hell” is one such interpretation. There are less ambiguous passages in the Bible. In Mark 16:15–16, we read: “And he [Jesus, after his resurrection] said unto them: ‘Go ye into the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.’” That’s pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 13:12–18, we read: If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. Gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. It is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt. None of those condemned things shall be found in your hands, so that the Lord will turn from his fierce anger; he will show you mercy, have compassion on you, and increase your numbers, as he promised on oath to your forefathers, because you obey the Lord your God, keeping all his commands that I am giving you today and doing what is right in his eyes.

This passage was originally written by and for the ancient Hebrews, but it is from the Christian Bible, so it seems reasonable to apply its message to all humans, for this is a popular and favored Christian way to interpret the whole of the Bible. As such, the passage is quite plain: worship some god other than God (aka Jehovah or Yahweh), and God’s followers will invade your town, kill you and your fellow citizens, and then burn your town to the ground, all by God’s command. Again, this passage is not ambiguous. Of course, it can be interpreted as having validity only in its historical context and hence no validity today. So, for example, a Christian could easily deny that this passage means that Christians today are to invade Tokyo and put all of its non-Christians to the sword. 70

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The Qur’an, too, makes it clear that death and destruction are the just fate of all nonbelievers: “God is the enemy of the unbelievers” (Qur’an 2:89); “Those who disbelieve, never will their wealth or their children avail them against God at all [save them from God’s judgment]; it is they who are fuel for the fire” (Qur’an 3:10); there are dozens of passages like this in the Muslim holy book. So, tolerance and diversity are not, at least on one reading, embraced by the central holy books of Christianity and Islam, the two largest religions on the planet. But now there is a problem. Both books are intended for all of humanity. There is little or no textual evidence that the Christian god and the Muslim one are the same deity (though in our age of at least a pretense of religious tolerance, it is often claimed that these deities are the same). And it is quite reasonable to believe that you cannot sincerely worship both of them. So, assuming the intolerant readings of both texts, no matter who you are and no matter what your religion is, you can conclude that some deity wants you dead. Two ways to avoid this horrible conclusion are adopting tolerant readings and believing that only your deity really exists. This antidiversity aspect of the Bible and Qur’an is not simply a threatening attempt to enforce membership. There is a moral imperative to belonging to the group you belong to: “Our group is the right group, other groups are wrong.”1 However, there is no power, no authority, if a religion just governs group membership. A religion must also govern what membership in the group means. And this they all do, sometimes in great detail, and never as a mere suggestion. For example, religions tell us who we can be friends with, who we can marry, who we can have sexual relations with (and when, if at all), what we can eat (and when), what station in life we can aspire to, what role we should play in the group, what work we should do (and how), what crops to plant (and when), which outsiders are more or less acceptable and which are loathsome and fit only for extermination, how we should breathe and walk, and of course how we should conceive of our world. . . . Religions tell us how we should live our lives and what we should think. In short, they tell us not only how we should be human, but what it means to be human. And again, in all religions, this is done with moral authority—it is a moral imperative to behave in the right way. It is wrong to be friends with members of a lower social caste, wrong to have sex with someone 71

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of your own gender (or wrong to have sex with someone not of your own gender before a certain age), wrong to eat the flesh of pigs or the flesh of other members of your group or of any insect other than grasshoppers, wrong to be a musician, wrong to lend money, wrong to just walk up to a dwelling and knock on the door, wrong not to plant maize, . . . and the list goes on and on . . . and on. Where do religions get their moral authority? From their supernatural deities, of course. But, in the day-to-day cases, who actually sees to it that the group’s rules are obeyed, and sees to it that, when they are not, punishment is forthcoming? Are the relevant gods of each group’s religion involved in such punishments? Of course not. It is the people of the group who see to it that punishment is inflicted. This is very clear, for example, in the Bible and the Qur’an: the involvement of the deities in these two books in matters of judgment and punishment (or reward) comes only upon a person’s death. But not all groups or peoples have (or had) a holy book. And even those groups with one rely on elders and priests to interpret the book’s rules. Therefore, on a day-to-day basis, it is social tradition or the group’s law enforcement procedures implemented by elders and priests (or their emissaries) that supply the necessary authority so that the group’s members can punish those who fail to obey the group’s rules. What happens if someone in a group fails to abide by that group’s religious rules—the rules constituting membership in the group? Often that person is the target of some sort of shaming—the offending member is informed in direct, public, and harsh terms that he or she has violated the rules. The person may lose certain rights or privileges. As the offenses get worse, the individual may face ostracism. Still worse offenses may result in banishment. The worst offenses bring the death penalty. All of these punishments are inflicted by the members of the group, not the deities. This small but brute fact—that punishment for rule violation is brought by the members of the group (ordinary physical beings all) and not their deities—suggests an entirely different approach to understanding the role religion plays in morality. As we saw in chapter 5, evolutionary considerations suggest that religion is part of what it means to be human. As a species, we are religious because being so helped us win in the struggle to get our genes into the next generation. Perhaps morality is evolutionary, too. This would make a lot of sense because 72

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then both the inclination for moral behavior and the use of religion as an enforcement tool would work together in us—making us behave appropriately . . . making us behave as the group we belong to says we are supposed to behave. Let us suppose, then, if just to explore the idea, that no religion gets its moral authority from any deity. Let us suppose that religions get their moral authority from exactly the same place religions get their very existence: the human mind and the nature of the world.

is a natural part of the human design is a very hot topic of research these days among anthropologists, biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists.2 By saying that morality is part of our design, I mean to say that morality is like language, like backbones, like enjoying music or food . . . like religion—it is written into our genes, and enhanced and molded by our culture. Moral feelings, moral sentiments, ideas of justice and fairness, right and wrong, good and bad, are a deep part of what it means to be human. One might wonder how morality can be genetic, or part of the human design, if it varies so much from group to group, from culture to culture. But, as we have seen, both languages and religions look to be part of the human design and they both vary wildly from culture to culture. What is part of the human design is the strong sense that some behaviors are moral, are right, while other behaviors are not moral, are wrong. Which behaviors actually wind up in which class is determined by the particular details of the group in question. The same is true for which language the group speaks and which deities they worship and how they worship them. That said, there appear to be some universals in morality just like there are for languages. For example, every language distinguishes between nouns and verbs—one class of words for picking out objects and things, and another class for picking out actions and doings. Just so, every culture, and every religion, has rules against murder.What varies is the definition of murder (who is okay to kill and who should not be killed). So, what evidence is there that morality is natural? For starters, the basics of morality are ubiquitous. Many kinds of animals—many different species, across many classes (birds, mammals, fish, and so on)— exhibit some understanding of what we call “decent behavior” (being T H E I D E A T H AT M O R A L I T Y

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reliable, trustworthy . . . colloquially stated: being a “stand-up guy,” or someone who would “stand up and be counted”). And these animals know when others of their kind are not behaving decently—for example, they know when others are cheating and respond negatively to such bad behavior. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean. Some species of fish do what’s called “predator inspection.” The fish, while eating, notice that something dark looms up ahead of them. It might be a large predator fish or the legs of a fish-eating bird, or it might be some floating moss or a log. Swimming away from food every time something dark looms up ahead is a good way to starve to death, since it happens often. The fish have to stay and eat. This is clearly a situation where more information would be very helpful.The only way to get more information is to swim a bit closer to the looming dark thing and inspect it for the telltale signs of being a predator (which the fish apparently know).The fish’s strategy is: if it appears to be a predator, then quickly swim off; otherwise, keep eating. Of course, the risk to gathering this extra information is that the looming dark thing might in fact be a predator, in which case the fish just swam closer to it. To lessen the chance of any particular fish getting eaten, fish do predator inspection in pairs. (Getting eaten is bad in itself, of course, but also lost would be the precious information about the looming dark thing.) Both fish swim equally close to inspect the predator. But if one of the fish in the pair holds back and only swims part of the way needed, that fish is cheating. He or she is now marked as a cheater in the minds of all the other fish and the cheater is shunned. The “other fish” part is interesting. In laboratory experiments, if the cheater is merely observed cheating by other fish that are perfectly safe (because they are in another tank of water, separated from the predator and the at-risk fish by a clear Plexiglas divider), then the observing fish will still shun the cheater and will not swim or eat with her or him—even though the cheater didn’t cheat on them directly.3 Cheating is behaving immorally—it is using someone else (fish or human or whatever) to further your own ends. . . . As the philosophers say: it is not treating the other person (or fish) as a person (or fish), but merely as a tool. So some fish understand a certain kind of immoral behavior, and they know it’s immoral, or at least they know it is behavior they don’t like. . . . Impressive.

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Of course, our primate cousins exhibit a much more robust kind of moral sensitivity to their fellows and their social situation that looks very similar to human morality. For example, primatologists have found that apes and monkeys will forgo food, even for days, to prevent another of their kind from receiving electrical shocks. (This is in a laboratory, experimental setting, and the shocks are only mildly painful; of course, it is far from clear that experiments of this sort are themselves moral.) Social rules that work for the good of all are also taught and enforced among chimpanzees. If primatologists feed a group of chimps who were raised in captivity and who live together every evening at a certain time, and if the scientists require all the chimps to be present before dinner can start (an efficiency measure that makes the researchers’ lives easier), and if (actually, when) some young chimps don’t come to dinner at the appropriate time (because they are busy playing or are being rebellious or both), then a few of the adult chimps go out and grab them, hit them a bit, and then drag the youths to dinner. The next day, the young chimps show up on time (for more, see Frans de Waal’s book Good Natured). That chimps have morals should not be too surprising since we all share a common ancestor. About twenty-four million years ago, what would eventually be the human/ape line split off from what would eventually turn into the monkey line. Humans and apes (chimps are a kind of ape) split apart into separate lineages somewhere around five to seven million years ago. (These numbers are still being researched, of course, but there is a fair amount of agreement that they are close to correct.) Why is moral behavior and sensitivity to immoral cheating ubiquitous? All the animals discussed above live in groups. Morality is first and foremost a set of rules for getting along with other members of one’s group. (As we will see, the more moral the rules become, or as the morality of the rules expands, the larger one’s group becomes.) The rules needn’t be complicated, nor do they need to be explicit. They can be hardwired or learned, or their general form can be hardwired while specific forms are learned. The key is that the rules establish what we humans would call respectful behavior toward others of the group. Actually respecting the others of the group would be best, but short of that, behaving respectfully will suffice.

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All of our mammalian cousins understand morality in some sense: whales, elephants, lions, hyenas, and so on show behavior similar in varying degrees to the chimps’—they almost all understand that they should care for and respect others of their kind and group, and those that don’t show such care and respect are avoided. Many animals other than mammals also have at least a sense of fair play. So it looks as if our human moral sentiments and notions have analogues in other animals—a very wide variety of kinds of animals. If the rudiments of morality are ubiquitous, and if our primate cousins have a kind of primitive morality, it is not too big a leap to suppose that our ancestors—Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Australopithecus, and on further back—had a kind of morality. All of our ancestors over the last twenty-five million years appear to have lived in groups, and as just discussed, morality is first and foremost a collection of rules for successful group living. Hence, it begins to look plausible that morality evolved. If so, morality is a natural part of what it means to be human . . . just like religion. We can now put the ideas of this chapter together with the ideas from chapter 5. Religions help glue groups together in two ways: they supply moral rules that foster cooperation, discourage cheating, and provide for conflict resolution, and they help make the members of the relevant group feel special by connecting them, and only them, to something larger, something beyond the ordinary: the group with its religious foundation. The power funding these two ways comes from the religion’s supernatural claims, as well as the religion’s notions of what’s sacred. Priests and elders (and other group leaders) rely on these claims when they exercise the authority the group has placed in their hands. Moreover, we know roughly what morality is: it is a set of rules or guidelines governing behavior with others in one’s group. The rules abstractly say, “Treat others of your kind this way.” All morality, of any culture, carries with it a sense that there is a right and wrong way to treat others, that there are good and bad behaviors and it is always best to choose the good behaviors. The italicized words constitute judgments of value (philosophers call these judgments “normative judgments” since they judge whether behaviors adhere to the norms set down by, for example, the community, or by reason and rationality, or by some deity). So, the claim then is that, because of the impact evolution had on our living in groups, humans naturally make value judgments. What’s interesting is that these judgments have a near-universal character to 76

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them. All cultures have rules against lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering. Of course, the details vary, and sometimes vary considerably. But the general rules are recognizable in any culture. So, morality is natural among humans. But are the rules correct? Are the normative judgments actually true? In broad outline, yes. Many people think otherwise. They think moral judgments are matters of personal preference, and hence are ultimately arbitrary. Moral judgments are just like judgments as to which ice cream flavor is best. You like chocolate; I like vanilla. To each his own. However, the naturalness of morality—the fact that morality is deeply integrated with our being human—strongly indicates that this is wrong: the judgments are not arbitrary; moral judgments are not like preferences for chocolate ice cream. Try saying this: “Serial killers like murder; I don’t. It suits them, but it doesn’t suit me. Different folks, different strokes. I shouldn’t try to force my preference on them.” Sounds perverse, doesn’t it? That’s because it is wrong to murder someone. It is not just that most humans think it is wrong or agree that it is wrong . . . wanton murder is actually wrong. Compare: it is not just that we all agree that 2 + 2 = 4; 2 + 2 really is 4. Of course, we could have used different symbols to represent this truth, but the truth itself exists independently of us humans and our counting systems. Well, if certain acts really are wrong, what does this say about religion? We will return to this question. For now, we need to dig deeper into the nature of morality.

R E C E N T R E S E A R C H I N T O T H E P S Y C H O L O G Y of morality indicates that its psychological roots in us are emotional. We feel sympathy for those suffering, affection for kith and kin, and anger toward cheaters and others doing what we don’t like. Conscious moral deliberation on our moral feelings came later in our evolutionary history, and comes later in life to most of us: it is only as we mature that we use reasoning to bolster, fine-tune, temper, or even reverse the decisions of our moral emotions.4 But what, specifically, does morality consist in for us humans? What are our feelings pointed toward? As noted above, morality has to do with how we treat others. But this is too general. What specifically constitutes the realm of the moral? For many people, morality consists primarily of issues of harm and fairness (justice). I am in this class of people. Nothing other than these two seems like a moral issue to

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me. Other people see the matter differently. From his research, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that morality across the human species in fact comprises five different psychological foundations: intuitions against harming, intuitions supporting fairness, the desirability of loyalty, respect for authority, and bodily and spiritual purity (for short, I will refer to these as harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity).5 According to Haidt, though all groups of humans see harm and fairness as central to morality, different groups of people apparently add in the other three in varying degrees of importance. So, for example, some might think that homosexuality or drug use violates bodily purity and is therefore immoral. Others, thinking that fairness and harm (which means harm to others) constitute the whole of morality, regard homosexuality and drug use as strictly personal matters that are morally neutral (like heterosexual sex and eating raisins). But further, members of this latter group will see such purity issues as discrimination against homosexuals and as draconian drug laws and therefore as themselves immoral because they constitute harm and injustice to both homosexuals and drug users. Some regard allegiance to a country and a country’s leader, no matter how corrupt and evil (short of killing one’s own family, say), as a moral duty because loyalty is a moral duty. But others regard such loyalty as itself immoral since it is cooperation with a criminal, immoral regime. The regime, in harming people, is behaving immorally. It is no wonder then that moral debates around the world are so rancorous and produce so much enmity. It is not just that different people define harm differently (for example, some insist that killing unbelievers isn’t immoral harming), it’s that different people define morality differently. Purity is either a moral or a personal issue, depending on who you are. And since morality is all based on feelings and emotions, it is difficult to deploy rational arguments to sway those with whom we disagree. It is therefore interesting to note here that often religions bolster Haidt’s latter three (loyalty, authority, and purity) at the expense of the first two. Of course, all religions have something to say about the importance of fairness and justice and of not harming fellow religionists. But these two are often secondary, placed in the service of the other three. For example, murdering homosexuals (which is certainly harming them) is textually required of all believers in the Christian Bible. Leviticus 20:13 says, “The man who has intercourse with a man in the same way as with a woman, they have both done a hateful thing 78

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together; they will be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” So, here, harming is second to (alleged) purity—enforcing purity within Christianity trumps concerns about harm. It is not a big jump to see that some religions’ central purpose—especially in their fundamental or radical versions—is to promote loyalty, authority, and purity as a means of keeping the group together.We have seen in the last chapter that religion is in part a method of knitting groups together. Now we see the details. Loyalty to the group’s leader(s) and gods, respect for the group’s authority figures (which of course includes its gods), and bodily and spiritual purity, as defined by the group, are all alleged moral duties. And all work strongly to keep the group together. Harm and justice, on the other hand, do not function as group glue as well as the other three. Here’s why. The idea that we shouldn’t harm generalizes. It may take thousands of years, but eventually the idea that you shouldn’t harm members of your own group generalizes to the idea that you shouldn’t harm anyone. This generalizes to the idea that you shouldn’t harm anything—plant or animal or even rocks, as some Jainists hold. (I will return to this generalization in part 3.) The same is true of fairness and justice. By definition fairness (justice) has to generalize, to apply to all people. There’s no such thing as fairness just among the elite of a group; justice cannot apply to only a few—that’s not justice, it’s special treatment, the antithesis of justice. So while a group might have group rules against harming and group rules implementing justice, eventually the members of the group will understand that these two moral notions must apply universally to truly be moral. Hence, in a deep way, the morality of not harming and making sure justice and fairness prevail are group disintegrators. Harm and fairness require group members to look beyond their group, to consider the welfare of nongroup members. The opposite is true of the other three. Loyalty, respect for authority, and purity do not generalize, they do not apply universally. They apply only within the group. Indeed, they are crucial to defining the group. Loyalty, authority, and purity are, therefore, group integrators. We can conclude then that the sharp and rancorous (as well as deadly) debates on morals and religion worldwide are profoundly related.Those humans who regard morality as consisting in the five foundations—harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity—are also those who tend to support more fundamentalist, radical, right-wing versions of their religions.6 They are opposed, in many ways, by those who view 79

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morality as consisting only in the foundations of avoiding harm and guaranteeing fairness. People of this latter variety tend to belong to more liberal wings of their religions . . . or to no religions at all (again, see Haidt’s work). Now finally, the problem is revealed: religion’s long reign as a binder of groups, as well as the morality that goes along with it, is under threat by a loose-knit group of humans who see morality as comprising only issues of harm and fairness . . . by a loose-knit group of humans who see the relevant group as all humanity, or even all life. If a group loses its religion, it loses its core binding morality, or at least the foundation for that morality. This is the morality that holds the group together—the duties to be pure, loyal, and respectful of the group’s authority. When that’s gone, then the group’s very existence is threatened.The cascade of losses can go the other way, too: if a group loses its core morality, then next its religion falls, then the group itself is threatened with doom. “If homosexuality is allowed, the United States is doomed,” a pastor once said to me. So religion and morality—especially loyalty, purity, and respect for authority—go together throughout much of the world. And for this reason, the world is a very dangerous place. One can ask if such humancaused danger is itself immoral.

S A V O R T H E I R O N Y H E R E . Our deepest convictions that the universe is more than it appears, that it brims with the supernatural and mystical, that it is ruled by a transcendent being beyond the laws of physics and indeed beyond the laws of all science . . . these very convictions are themselves completely natural, completely determined by the laws of nature—evolution, to be precise. We see (or hear) walking trees because we are an African ape that evolved—specifically, we evolved big brains. We see walking trees for the exact same reasons we can stand upright, speak languages, and sing. We are a product of nature and its laws. That these laws have produced such a confused animal as we are shows only how utterly natural they—and we—are, for laws aren’t the sorts of things that can care . . . they just work—mechanically, remorselessly, and without joy. But the situation here is worse than mere irony. With respect to religion and morality, and as we saw in chapter 4, we are in exactly the

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same state as an obese person who loves eating fried foods and donuts. Humans evolved taste buds and taste preferences that guarantee that we very much like fried fat and refined sugar. When we ingested all of our fats and sugars in the form of fresh meat and fruit, that was good, but in the age of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, we are eating only fats and sugars and in large quantities, and this is bad. Fried fats and refined sugars do not provide us with good nutrition. So, we have to retrain our taste buds to like other foods. We have to work to eat nutritiously in this modern age. The same with religion. It now appears to be bad for us, though at one time in our evolutionary history it was good for us—it helped humans survive by helping human groups survive. But the fact that we use religion to insult, harm, repress, maim, enslave, torture, and kill other people and other animals is vastly outweighing any good religion does.There are seven billion of us on the planet.We don’t need to worry about humans surviving the elements anymore; that we have clearly done. Instead, we need to worry about surviving our staggering success. It is true that we also use religion to inspire good and to provide solace in times of tragedy. But inspiring good is best handled directly, by a genuine appreciation of the lives of other beings, rather than by the carrot of Heaven and the stick of Hell (see chapter 7); and providing solace is better handled by trained social workers and clinical psychologists. So, does God, or some god somewhere, want me dead? Does God want you dead? What is the answer to this troubling question, really? To wonder if God wants you dead or to say that God wants you dead is exactly to wonder if fat and sugar want you dead or to say that fat and sugar want you dead. It is you and I who want fat and sugar, and if we don’t control our desires, wired into us by evolution, then we will partake too much, and, besotted with these formerly hard-to-come-by nutrients, we will die. The very same thing is true of religion.

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Good Without Gods

T H E C O N N E C T I O N B E T W E E N R E L I G I O N and morality is tight, at least many humans think so. And, for most of these people, this connection is felt: one just cannot be a good person and not religious. After filling out a job application many years ago and writing “atheist” in the box labeled “What is your religion?” the interviewer asked me, quite nervously, if I still believed in, and if I could still tell, right from wrong. I assured him I did and could. He was dubious. (But not overly dubious; I got the job.) The point of this chapter is to explore the idea that morality, ethics, and just behaving nicely are themselves completely natural. We want to explore and develop the idea that morality of a particularly strong sort can emerge without any help from religion at all. If the independence of religion and morality proves credible, then we will know that we don’t need religion to be moral. Can we then jettison it completely? Let’s get our bearings. From chapter 5, we learned that being religious appears to be evolutionary. We are religious for roughly the same reasons we use languages to communicate: being religious helped us survive and reproduce. From chapter 6, we learned that morality and religion are close allies in promoting the flourishing of human groups . . . but with the consequence that many religions, and certainly the dominant two (traditional Christianity and Islam), are deeply immoral, because they violate the proscriptions against harming and being unfair (for example, by advocating discrimination against homosexuals). Of

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course, both religions are deeply moral, too, if one assumes that loyalty, respect for authority, and purity are part of morality, an assumption that we won’t be making here. It begins to look like the more one takes proscriptions against harm and unfairness as basic, the less one can be traditionally religious—for example, the less one can be traditionally Christian or Muslim.1 The idea that morality is independent of religion ought to seem at least somewhat plausible right off. Religion and morality don’t have to go together. Pretty obviously, one can be a theist and immoral—the greatest evils were, and still are, perpetrated on humankind and other living things by deeply religious people. Also, one can be an atheist and moral.2 Eschewing harm, promoting fairness, being loyal, respecting (respect-worthy) authority, and keeping oneself pure (in some sense) can all be accomplished without invoking any gods at all.

over the basis of morality, of ethical behavior. Interestingly, for the most part, these were, and are, nonreligious arguments. We will concentrate on two of the most favored nonreligious bases: consequences and obligations. On a consequence view, an act done by some person is morally right or morally wrong depending on its consequences: whether they are, in some specific sense, good or bad. And judgments about whether an act is right or wrong must look to the consequences of the act, judging whether they are good or bad. What kind of consequences are we talking about and what do we mean by “good” and “bad”? Different thinkers focus on different kinds and different definitions. Some say that what matters is just whether or not the act produces pleasure or not. An act is morally right if it produces pleasure and not pain for some group of people. Some, drawing a distinction between pleasure and happiness, say that what matters is whether the act contributes to the happiness or unhappiness of some or perhaps many (or even all?) people. Pleasure is what you get when you eat your favorite ice cream or have sex with someone. Happiness is what you get when an important project is successfully completed, or a deep insight is perceived, or one realizes that one’s love for someone else is deepening. Happiness, but not simple pleasure, is associated with human flourishing, political liberty, profound beauty, and so on. FOR MILLENNIA, PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ARGUED

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Philosophers typically focus on happiness and not just pleasure, or at least not simple pleasures. Happiness can include pleasure, but pleasure by itself is thought to be insufficient to make an act moral. This is because maximizing pleasures doesn’t seem to guarantee morally right acts. Here’s a typical philosophical objection to relying on pleasures. Imagine that a population of people gets pleasure from torturing animals. They torture dogs, cats, horses, goats, rabbits, lizards, birds, . . . any animal they can get their hands on. They torture them brutally, too. The pleasure of the torturers and their onlookers is immense and intense. They love it. The torture is also broadcast so that everyone in the population can experience the pleasure in real time. Life is good, except for all the animals, of course. Asked if their torturing is immoral, the members of this population say, “Heck, no! Torturing produces pleasure in us; this is a good consequence; so our torturing is moral.” “In fact,” they add, “the word ‘moral’ means ‘producing pleasurable consequences.’” It is obvious that something has gone horribly awry here. This population is tremendously immoral; their actions are horrible. So pleasure, it seems, won’t work for justifying an act as moral or not. Those who embrace pleasure as the determiner of whether an act is moral or not usually respond by saying that the pleasure they are talking about has to be distributed among all. Since only the population of torturers receives pleasure and their animal victims do not, the population’s acts of torture aren’t moral. Nice save. But when push comes to shove, many philosophers and other thinkers believe that pleasure is not deep enough, not important enough, to ground an act’s morality. Here’s why. Think of a large number of people enslaved for decades or even hundreds of years, where none of the slaves even knows anything about individual flourishing, personal decisions, goals, and responsibilities, the freedom to live one’s life as one wants, and so on. The slaves are not allowed to have families, let us suppose. Baby slaves are produced in vitro by the enslavers. There is just constant work, supplied by the enslavers. But imagine that the work isn’t onerous—suppose it is tending herds or sorting small, pretty rocks or something. And imagine, too, that everyone has plenty of ice cream to eat and anything else that they desire for their pleasure (except, of course, freedom and the like)—there’s plenty of food, shelter, sex, and so on. And all the slaves are kept healthy by 84

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the slavers. The enslavers, let us suppose, derive considerable quantities of pleasure from having slaves, and the slaves’ pleasure is also reasonably high: their work is not hard, and they have all the simple luxuries they want. So pleasure is high all around. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that this world is immoral. The slaves are being treated very badly and quite immorally. They are not allowed to choose their own destiny, their own projects, their own work, or even their own pleasures—all slaves learn to eat and love ice cream, suppose. The fact that the slaves are ignorant of these choices doesn’t mean that they are being treated morally. In fact, the slaves’ ignorance about the choices they should have means their treatment is even more immoral. What’s missing are the ingredients for deep happiness: the ability to decide one’s life for oneself; the chance to create, to struggle, to succeed, to flourish, and to fail. . . . It is interesting and has long been noted that the ingredients for deep happiness are the same as the ones for deep sadness. One measure of the immorality of the slaves’ lives is that they have no real chance for deep unhappiness due to their own failures to succeed. For reasons such as these, happiness, not pleasure, is preferred as the basis for consequence-based theories of morality. (Producing happiness of a deep sort is perhaps the most common variety of any consequence view of morality. Other good consequences include increasing political freedom or personal autonomy, but it is hard to see how consequences such as these can matter independently of producing happiness. Here, we will stick with happiness.) So, any act that increases deep happiness for any large group of people is considered a morally good act. (Remember that happiness is more than mere pleasure; it is the outcome or a side effect of human flourishing.) Any act that decreases happiness is considered morally wrong. For example, murder is wrong because it decreases happiness, not only for the victim (if the victim knows she’s being killed) and the victim’s family and friends, but throughout the victim’s community, too. Murder is worse than robbery, usually, which is also wrong, because murder causes more unhappiness than robbery does (usually). So we see that appealing to happiness as the basis for morality seems promising. We need a slogan for this view of morality. “The ends justify the means” will do nicely, although many prefer “the greatest good for the greatest number,” since “the ends justify the means” is often viewed as an excuse for bad behavior. We also need a name for this view. The 85

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“happy consequences view” will do, or the “consequences view,” for short. In philosophical circles, this view is called consequentialism.3 But now notice—nothing about the consequences’ happiness need be religious. It is now straightforward to see that a morality based on happiness might work just fine, and yet be completely nonreligious. A community of atheists who distinguished moral acts from immoral ones on the basis of deep happiness for as many beings as possible would clearly be moral, in a very strong sense, and yet they would be completely godless. So, gods aren’t required for morality . . . at least the kind based on happy consequences. If the ends really do justify the means (and many philosophers think this is correct), then what need is there of a god? No need, it seems. However, many philosophers and others concerned with the nature of morality think that basing morality on happiness, or indeed on any consequences at all, is incorrect. These thinkers believe that something much deeper is required to ground morality. It’s not the consequences of an act but the act itself that matters. Morality, they say, is more than consequences; it is a special connection to other beings that is not reducible to something simpler, certainly not something that appears to come in measurable quantities, like happiness. Morality is about being obligated in certain ways to other people and other living beings. This obligation arises simply because the other living beings are, in fact, other living beings. If something is alive, we are obligated to not kill it. Period. If something can feel pain, we are obligated not to cause it pain. Period. In general, we are obligated to care for and enhance the welfare of all other beings. If someone doesn’t understand these obligations, then either that person doesn’t understand the very notion of obligation, or that person doesn’t understand what it means for some other being to be alive or to feel pain. Either way, something pretty serious is being missed. As the reader can see, this is a particularly strong, uncompromising form of morality. Moral standing and having rights, on this view, inhere in living beings just like mass or energy . . . or better, just like being alive inheres in them. Something is deserving of being treated morally, kindly, and well simply because it is a living thing. If one likes, one can say that part of the definition of the notion of “living thing” requires that it be accorded rights and be treated in accordance with those rights. 86

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Philosophers and others who hold this view locate morality in beings themselves, rather than in happiness produced by any actions that might be directed toward other beings. Indeed, on this view, the happiness produced by actions is regarded as strictly irrelevant to whether or not the action was moral. If I work for the benefit of others’ welfare, happiness of course might result. And of course this would be good. But that is not what makes my actions moral, nor is promoting happiness why I do them. My job, on this view, as a living being on this planet, is to treat others well, to treat them as I would want to be treated. Their welfare is my concern simply because there is such a thing as their welfare. Being moral emerges as a responsibility I have, not the result of some calculus of happiness, however deep or long measured. The most important argument for this “responsibility” view of morality is that my responsibility to you might well require that I do something that decreases your happiness. I might have to tell you an unhappy truth, for example, or deny you something important. The welfare of others is harder to define than their happiness, but on this view of morality, it is far more important. The essential point here is that moral responsibility to others’ welfare trumps happiness. And since happiness does not necessarily coincide with one’s moral responsibility to others’ welfare, we should focus on this responsibility rather than mere happiness. We see then that this view of morality completely changes the moral landscape. By saying that living things deserve to be treated well by all other beings, the focus is placed on other beings. It is not that we should produce happiness, it is that others deserve it. And it is not that others deserve happiness, but rather that they deserve the best life possible. The universe is such that living the best life possible often produces happiness, but it’s the life that matters, not the quantity of happiness in it. On this view of morality, the adage “the ends justify the means” becomes grotesque. Now is a good time to reiterate an important theme we’ve seen before in part 2. The fact that the universe is such that living the best life possible only often produces happiness makes a compelling reason to believe that the universe is godless. It’s the “often” that ruins belief. There are plenty of people who live exemplary lives but live in deep unhappiness. And plenty of very happy people live mean, cruel lives or silly, frivolous ones worthy of nothing. Wouldn’t any sort of god worth 87

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worshiping have made a universe where living the best life possible always produces happiness? And furthermore, wouldn’t such a deity have arranged things so that being happy was entirely contingent on living the best life possible? The great philosopher Leibniz, for one, sought to solve this problem by arguing that the Christian deity did in fact produce the best world logically possible—the best of all possible worlds, so that, though happiness and living a good life are not inextricably linked (which would be perfect but impossible), they are linked as closely as any deity can get them. Of course, Leibniz’s view seems quite implausible—the reader can no doubt easily think of one thing that, if it were improved, would not make the entire rest of the world worse. For example, a sexual assault occurs somewhere in the United States about every two minutes;4 suppose just one of those assaults didn’t occur.That would clearly make this world a better place, so our world cannot be the best of all possible worlds. The classic refutation of Leibniz’s view is Voltaire’s famous book Candide (1759). In fact, Leibniz’s argument has never been considered convincing, for he never made clear why making a perfect world was impossible—after all, that is what Heaven is supposed to be. Back to morality. We need a name for this second view of morality. “The deservingness of all others view” would do, but it is a tad long, so I will use “the duty view,” since we have a duty or responsibility toward all others. We also need a slogan for the duty view. “Treat others as you would like to be treated” would do (the reader perhaps recognizes this as a version of the Golden Rule, present in many religions, interestingly), but, since the focus of the duty view is the other beings of our world, let’s place all the other beings to which we have a duty at the center. So a better slogan would be simply “treat all other living beings so as to increase their welfare.” Or perhaps, “treat all other living beings with profound kindness.” In philosophical circles, this view, or certain variants, is often called deontology, or the deontological view.5 There is another slogan sometimes associated with the duty view: Fiat justitia, ruat coelum, or “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” We could amend this here to say, “Let others be treated so as to increase their welfare, though the heavens fall.”6 “Though the heavens fall” . . . This quotation points to the fact that neither the heavens nor anyone abiding therein is needed, at least as far as the duty view is concerned.

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We shouldn’t kill, not because some commandant in some holy book says we shouldn’t, but because killing is not doing our duty, which is treating others with profound kindness. Let the heavens fall, I will not kill homosexuals. No one should. On the duty view, the fate of the heavens, then, is strictly irrelevant to behaving morally. It is now clear, as it was with the happy consequences view, that a community of atheists could live in profound morality, relying only on the duty view. No gods or goddesses are needed at all. The duty to behave well toward others is ours. It is not forced on us by some hairy thunderer. We ourselves see the truth of, and necessity for, this duty, just like we see the truth of 2 + 2 = 4. We don’t need it pointed out to us by some cosmic watcher. The deservingness of others is manifest in their very being. No deity of any sort is required to explain this to us. We figured it out for ourselves.

Both the duty view and the happy consequences view are rational. It is rational to desire happiness, especially the deep, long-term kind. It is also rational to want to increase the happiness of your group, or of all humans, or of all life. The same is true of the duty view. Once one understands that other beings are, in fact, other beings, with their own goals, dreams, desires, and rights, then one can rationally conclude that those other beings are equally deserving of a chance to fulfill those goals and dreams. Of course, being rational isn’t sufficient for being moral on either view. Both views also require feelings and emotions so that feeling happiness and feeling concern for others are possible. For example, the duty view is enhanced if we feel empathy for the plights of others, since it is easier to act on a duty you feel than one you merely comprehend. Nevertheless, the role of rationality in each view is obvious. Clear thinking and happy, kind feelings can guide behavior. This is a shocking conclusion to most religious people. There is a vast land of morality captured in the duty view and the happy consequences view. None of it requires a god to make it work. Our conclusion, then, is that we don’t need religion at all to have even a very strong sort of morality and deep moral commitments. Religion was used by our forefathers and foremothers to enforce adherence N O W F O R T H E TA K E - H O M E M E S S A G E .

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to their community’s ethical rules. Religion is still used for this. But it is all quite unnecessary. Morality stands on its own. No god is required to prop it up. I am often asked, as with job interviewer, if removing god opens the door to such despicable acts as torturing a dog or a human baby. We now see that the answer to this question is No! And we see how to answer No! to this question, in no uncertain terms. But we also have something much stronger.Were some god to decree that torturing dogs or babies was now moral, we would know that this god lies, that this god is itself evil. We now see that any god who advocates, say, killing homosexuals, or nonbelievers, or bulls for sacrifice, or captured enemy soldiers is profoundly immoral and not in the least worthy of our respect or worship. Morality now stands before us as a truth we discern with our big brains. It is a truth on par with mathematical truths, like the Pythagorean theorem. And it is a truth on par with physical truths like the Earth is spherical and the universe is very old and very big, and with the truth that humans are African apes.

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The Journey in Tatters

EIGHT

Beyond Atheism The Religion Illusion

T H E T W O M O S T I M P O R T A N T T H I N G S to explain about religion are why there are tens of thousands of religions today on planet Earth and why all of them are so resistant to the refuting evidence. The answer: religions are part of the human blueprint, just like speaking a language. Humans are religious because our ancestors who were religious reproduced more successfully than our ancestors who weren’t. This is the only explanation that works and is satisfying. But now we are faced with a shocking conclusion: there is no such thing as any religion. There is no such thing as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca, Sikhism, and so on. Yes, there are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Witches, and Sikhs . . . but none of them actually practices a religion. Among most of Earth’s religious people (which is to say, among most people), the idea that there are religions goes hand in hand with the idea that one religion is right and the others are wrong. Even among “enlightened” religious people who embrace some version of religious diversity, the idea persists that religion is correct.To get around the idea that the thousands of religions vary wildly, such “enlightened” people often say: “Perhaps we’ve all got our own interpretations of the fundamentally spiritual core of the universe, but that there is a spiritual core of the universe is not in question.” Indeed, it is common to argue as follows: “That so many people are religious, even if they differ

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considerably, surely points to a universal truth: that there is something holy and sacred, perhaps some being whom we but understand incompletely.” But we now know this is exactly like arguing, “That so many people eat large quantities of fat and sugar, even if they differ in what manner they consume them, surely points to a universal truth: that fat and sugar are good for us.” Most humans regard this latter argument as so silly that they cannot see the tight analogy between it and the first argument. Yet the two are exactly the same. The curious part is that so many of us let science tell us that fats and sugars are not good for us when consumed in large fried quantities, but turn a deaf ear to science telling us that there is no such thing as Christianity. True, we can explain why religion has the grip on us that it does, but few take that explanation to heart. Yet, when we do, when we allow the truth to wash over us, we see that there is no such thing as religion. There is no Navajo religion, no such thing as the religions of the Aboriginal peoples in Australia, the religions of the ancient Pueblo peoples, or the Chinese traditional religions. All religions are illusions supplied by our genetic makeup and the culture in which we were raised. As mentioned previously, Richard Dawkins pointed out that we all know what it is like to be an atheist—when we consider religions other than our own, we instantly become robust atheists asking all manner of embarrassing questions of our non-coreligionists. I am urging us to go further, though—to see a deeper truth. In the privacy of our own minds, even if we outwardly embrace religious diversity, we can come to know exactly the truth “Religion X doesn’t exist,” where X is any religion that is not ours. Then, generalizing (“why should my religion, out of all them, be the correct one?”), we can jettison our own religion, too. Atheism doesn’t really get at the heart of the matter. It is not that there are no gods or goddesses, but rather that there are no religions. What we call religion is people engaged in various rituals at various times of the year and at various stages of their lives, wearing various ritualistic clothing, and uttering various words and phrases. But this is all a kind of vast pretending, a pretending so complete that most of us cannot even see the pretense, a pretending fueled solely by our genetic makeup and our group membership. This is why I say there are, for example, Christians but no Christianity.Yes, there are people asking for, indeed begging for, forgiveness for their sins, but there is no one doing 94

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FIGURE 8.1. The Müller-Lyer illusion. Both horizontal lines are the same length, even though it is likely that you see the bottom one as shorter. Interestingly, this illusion, as well as many others, seems to vary across cultures: see, for example, Segall, Campbell, and, Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception.

the forgiving and there is no supernatural mechanism whereby sins are forgiven. Indeed, there are no sins. Yes, there are Buddhists earnestly meditating in search of nirvana and the cessation of death and rebirth, but there is no nirvana to achieve, and no one ever has to worry about being reborn. Religions are therefore illusions, brought to us by our biology and our culture. Humans are prey to many kinds of illusions. This phenomenon is well known and well studied, though not well understood. Optical illusions, of which there are many, are the most famous examples. (See the Müller-Lyer illusion in figure 8.1.) In the Müller-Lyer illusion, it is next to impossible not to see the two horizontal lines as being of different lengths. But if one measures them, one can determine that they are the same length. More strongly, backed by measuring, one can see that the lines are the same length, even though one cannot see the lines as the same length. Our conclusion from part 2 is that religions are another form of illusion, a special illusion to which humans are particularly susceptible. And I suspect that, just as with the Müller-Lyer illusion, it may be next to impossible to not perceive a divine hand guiding the world. But with science playing the role of measurement, we can come to see that there is no divine hand guiding the world and hence no point to worshiping. 95

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The issues here are surprisingly and alarmingly deep. They cut to the heart of metaphysics, the philosophical discipline that attempts to describe the ultimate nature of reality. The most important question within metaphysics is “how much of ‘external reality’ is supplied by the human mind?” Or better: “how much of my ‘external reality’ is supplied by my mind?” The great French philosopher Descartes pointed out that the answer could be “perhaps all of it but me.” Descartes argued that with a bit of practice, we can doubt the existence of everything but our selves. (Our selves are exempt because something has to be doing the doubting, which is a kind of thinking.) The movie The Matrix shows vividly one version of this profound Cartesian truth. In the movie, all of what we consider ordinary reality is in fact a gigantic computer simulation downloaded into our brains, as many billions of us lie helplessly in vats of goo. How much of reality is supplied by our minds? Fortunately, we can put this deepest and most difficult of all questions to one side here. We are only concerned with how much of religious “reality” is supplied by our minds. And the answer appears to be “all of it.”

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The Janus-Faced Hominid

O U R J O U R N E Y I S I N T A T T E R S . It has been checked by science and rationality. We don’t need religion for morality. We don’t need gods to explain why unexpected good or bad things happen. And religious feelings are perfectly natural, like our ability to speak a language or our love of sweets. Finally, we see that religions are illusions, illusions that cut to our very core as human beings, but illusions nonetheless. So, if we insist on being religious, we would have to be nontraditionally religious. For starters, morality requires that we be openly accepting of gays and lesbians and so on; we would have to accept nonbelievers and not think of them as benighted and doomed; and we would have to not treat the planet as our toy or toilet. We’d also have to treat our love affair with the supernatural with a bit of irony, for it would be recognized solely as due to our psychology and we’d know that there is no supernatural realm, so we’d have to fool ourselves into going along with the gag—sort of like we do with movies: we know they are made using actors and cameras, but we let the story sweep us away anyway. There are lots of other things any nontraditional religion would have to do besides these. We could maybe adopt the new moral positions, but it is not clear that we could fool ourselves into embracing the needed faux-supernaturalness. There are no walking trees, there is merely the human creative imagination, at its most robust when it is unfettered.

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We’ve seen this two-sided, or even two-faced, idea before, in chapter 4. This is just another version. Humans are moral and religious naturally, for purely biological reasons. But we are also scientists and rationalists purely and naturally, as well as for biological reasons. Being curious, figuring out how things work (like fire, for example), is very beneficial to human flourishing. Our evolved big brains are excellent at proposing hypotheses and testing them, working to arrive at sound conclusions. Humans are naturally good at mathematics, geology, chemistry, physics, and biology. Of course, it took us almost a couple hundred thousand years to get really good at the sciences, but that we did is just as much who we are as being religious.1 Therefore, all humans, you and me, stand every day at the crossroads, Janus-faced. Janus was the Roman god of gates, doorways, beginnings, endings, and changes (and the god after whom the month of January is named). He was depicted with two faces or heads, facing in opposite directions. He represents the dual nature of time and place, the middle ground between coming and going, and for the Romans, the middle ground between anarchic barbarism and stifling civilization. He also represents the contemplation of which path to take. We have two faces: we have a science face, a face steeped in rationality, in curiosity and a desire for understanding how things work and why, a face that is dubious of fantastic claims; and we have a religious face, a face that wants to see evidence of the supernatural, of the fantastic, and does—a face that wants some superhuman deity to be in charge, that wants rules of behavior founded on profound worship to govern our societies, a face that wants everyone to worship the same gods. Which are we: scientists or worshipers? We are, alas, both. At least many of us are. Of course, a few of us have the luxury of being only one, either purely rationalist, blithely free of any concerns for the supernatural, or purely religious, talking daily to some deity who cares for us, oblivious to the contradictions this entails. Both David Wilson and Daniel Dennett (see chapter 5) are in the supposedly happy category of those bereft of any sense of the supernatural, bereft of any sense of a universal connection to any world behind the world—they are in the One Billion. As noted in chapter 7, Wilson refers to himself as a nice atheist. Dennett promotes himself as a Bright, and encourages others to become Brights.2 The pope, presumably, is in the category of those who

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have the luxury of never questioning or having to question the existence of their deities (or if they did question, they came to a clear answer). The Dalai Lama probably never doubts the truths of Buddhism, including reincarnation. All these people are the lucky ones—they are doubt-free. The rest of us, the majority, are pulled in both directions, doubting both, wanting both.We feel the presence of something greater than ourselves, greater than the standard natural world, but we reason clearly that there is nothing but the standard natural world. The clash between these two aspects of our nature couldn’t be deeper or more profound: religions change the evidence to fit their ideas; sciences change their ideas (their theories) to fit the evidence. These two are radically different approaches to reality and the discovery of any new, countervailing evidence. So, to be Janus-faced is to be truly divided. To pick a very important and topical illustration of what I mean . . . Before Darwin, both Anglophone and European theists and atheists alike thought that life on Earth was only a few thousand years old, and that all of it had existed in more or less the same form from the beginning of time. After Darwin, only theists believed this, and not even all of them believed it. Those that did had to do lots of ad hoc patching to keep the Genesis creation view alive in the face of the mounting counterevidence. They either denied the evidence, misrepresented it, fabricated their own Genesis-creation evidence, or said that the devil was fabricating the alleged evidence to throw us off our path to God. All four methods are in full force today. So, those that were convinced by Darwin’s evidence and arguments changed their beliefs. Sometimes radically. Those that insisted on believing that Genesis-creation was the truth changed what they regarded as evidence—they changed the evidence. We Janus-faced hominids do not stand at a fork in the path, as if we could choose either rationalism and science or spirit and religion once and for all. Rather, we carry in our dual natures both the power of objective rationality and the knowledge of a weird realm longed-for and perceived obliquely. What kind of spiritual journey is this? What kind can it be? Are we all to wind up like Mother Teresa, lying to ourselves and the universe, suffering silently? Or are we to wind up like the physicist Steven

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Weinberg, an atheist, who famously said, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless”?3 Deceit or meaninglessness. The faces of Janus. There are three ways to deal with our Janus nature. One, work hard to get rid of one face, either the rational, scientific one or the religious one. Two, keep each face but cut the head in two, making two heads, one gets the religious face and the other the scientific face; then keep the heads separate from each other. Three, accept the fact that we are Janus-faced. I will take each of these in order.

Get Rid of One Face

Which face? Which side of our dual natures should we get rid of? Chapters 5, 6, and 7 strongly suggest that getting rid of our religious side is required. Many advocate just this view.4 Look at the ravaging knowledge we’ve produced so far. Religion is an evolutionarily supplied aspect of our all-too-human psychology (chapter 5), morality is evolutionary and psychological as well, and even if there is something more to morality than mere psychology, morality can be robustly achieved independently of religion (chapters 6 and 7). Given all of this, let’s just get rid of our religious side. There are several problems with this, however. First: how could this be accomplished? If religion is really a part of our genetic makeup, an aspect of us as human as language or music, then getting rid of it might be impossible, at least getting rid of it and keeping us human might be impossible. We can temper it, perhaps, but getting rid of it completely and directly would require knowledge of our genetics, developmental biology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology that we just don’t have and are not going to get any time soon. Directly removing the human proclivity for religion, say, by directly altering the relevant genes (this greatly oversimplifies the matter, but let’s ignore this here), requires science and technology that from our perspective is now simply science fiction. Second, religion is not an unmitigated evil by any means. It is responsible for considerable good. After all, if the biologists are right, religion helped us evolve. It did this probably, as we’ve seen, by knitting human groups together. So, religion helps

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humans, within a group at least, get along. That means that religion actually bestows an advantage on us. So getting rid of religion (even if we could do it) could increase the nastiness on the planet. Another way to look at this is to note that removing the religious inclination from humans would likely result in an entirely new and separate species. We have no reason to believe that this species would behave better than we do. It is easy to imagine a species behaving better than we do, but we have no way to guarantee that this imagined species is the one we’d create.5 The question here is: what do you get if you remove religion from humankind? Answer: who knows? . . . but it would definitely be a good idea to run this experiment somewhere safe, where the new species couldn’t do much damage. Above, I stressed “directly.” By this, I meant going into the lab and changing our genes, our neurochemistry, our cognitive architecture, and so on. However, there is an obvious indirect way to remove religion that might actually work . . . and it is as old as humankind: breeding. Since the first, we humans have indirectly altered the genes of thousands of species from maize to dogs to horses to wheat to onions to bananas. Domestication is a kind of breeding program. And without knowing any of the technical details, humans have been breeding animals and plants for a hundred thousand years. So, let’s use breeding, and breed a race of atheists. On paper, it’s simple. Consider the One Billion from chapter 2. We simply pick from this group those that are the most atheistic, those that are the most content living only in a natural world, and we allow only these humans to have children. All others are sterilized. If you are religious, even a tiny bit, you cannot reproduce. Could this work? Well, it would definitely have a good effect on our overpopulation problem. But as a solution, it is dead in the water. First, how would we institute such a breeding program? Almost every nation on Earth is governed by the religious. And those few countries that actually tried to stamp out religion (for example, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Mao’s China) failed miserably, even at the highest levels (which is not surprising if religion is written into our genes). In the United States, being religious, indeed being Christian, is a tacit part of the job description of almost every elected office, from mayor to president. US voters would probably elect an avowed lesbian as president

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before they’d elect an avowed atheist. So implementing the “atheist breeding program” is not in the cards. It is so not in the cards that even having a public discussion of it on our national stage is not in the cards. But we can go a little further. Let’s imagine for minute what might happen if such a program were implemented. Again, the science, or lack of it, gets in the way. We are scientifically ignorant of the relation between genetic endowment and learning, so we have no reason to believe that being a hardcore atheist guarantees atheistic children. In fact, just the opposite. Plenty of atheists have theist children, and plenty of devout theists have atheist children. Even trying to breed a race of people with big noses is next to impossible, genetics being the kind of poorly understood, statistical, natural process that it is. But if breeding big noses is hard, breeding for cognitive capacities and metaphysical outlook is next to impossible, at least in our current state of ignorance about how learning works. The atheistic breeding program is as likely to yield a population of new religionists—perhaps with a new, deadly religion . . . deadly for the rest of us—as it is to yield a population of nice atheists like David Wilson. In the distant future, if we make it that far, we might be able to genetically engineer religion out of our genome, but we cannot do this now, to put it mildly. So again, the atheistic breeding program is out.6 What about getting rid of our science and rationality side? This is preposterous, of course. Even fanatically religious suicide bombers use rationality and science. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States were paragons of diabolical logic and calculated planning. The terrorists’ plan was brilliant, really: simple, easy to execute, and extremely deadly. Rationality, of a sort at least, was at work in full force in their minds. So, rationality is ubiquitous. The Devil is well endowed with it. Getting rid of rationality (which, as with religion, is scientifically impossible) would therefore do far more damage than getting rid of religion. Rationality may also be essential for any sort of life. Fully irrational “humans” wouldn’t even be a species, for all animals, even plants, exhibit at least some rationality merely by trying to achieve goals. In fact, “fully irrational, intelligent beings” is an oxymoron, like “round square.” Finally, our love of science, our love of and need for explanations, and our curiosity are likewise so deeply a part of us that removing them would destroy us. And it is unlikely that the resulting life form (assuming it would be such) would be able to do much more 102

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than absorb energy and nutrients. . . . Lichen does that pretty well. Turning us into lichen seems draconian, and anyway, lichens aren’t religious (probably), so what’s the point? So getting rid of either our religious side or our rational, scientific side is not a real choice. Let’s move on to option two.

Cut the Janus-Faced Head in Two

This option keeps our two faces, but separates them so thoroughly that they cannot interact. This option perhaps seems like a nonstarter, but in fact one of the most important biologists of the twentieth century has strongly advocated exactly this. Stephen Jay Gould, a world-famous evolutionist and science writer, proposed what he called nonoverlapping magisteria for the proper relationship between science and religion.7 Instead of science versus religion, Gould said that science and religion are in fact so different that they can easily coexist, respecting each other’s dominion. Gould’s idea is without question the best-argued and most articulate expression of this solution to our Janus natures. So I will focus on it. A magisterium is “a domain of authority in teaching” (p. 5), “a domain where one form of teaching [or discussion] holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (p. 5). Gould’s idea is that religion and science are different magisteria, and so can and should exist independently of each other. Humans can well be religious on Sundays, or Friday nights, or Tuesday afternoons and scientific the other days of the week without any difficulty. In defining the central idea of nonoverlapping magisteria, Gould says: I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation or analysis; but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict. Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. (p. 4) 103

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If anyone other than Gould had written that, I would have thought that person irremediably naïve. But Gould is not naïve. So, I can only assume this suggestion of his results from some level of desperation. He so wanted to halt the war between science and religion as well as keep them both that he fabricated this idea of separate domains. But a moment’s reflection reveals that religion and science are not separate magisteria at all—they are profoundly overlapping magisteria. All religions make factual claims about the world: Jehovah created it in six days, Changing Woman created the Navajo who live on it, ghosts roam the world, magic can heal the sick, prayer is talking to Yahweh (or Jesus or Allah or Zeus), living beings reincarnate, and on and on. In fact, it is because all religions make factual claims that they are able to supply purpose, meaning, and values. For example, Buddhism supplies meaning and value to Buddhists’ lives by telling them that, if they work hard, they will be reincarnated up the hierarchy of knowledge until they finally reach enlightenment—which is a factual claim. Oddly, and disturbingly, in flatly denying the obvious truth that religions make factual claims, and in denying that religion and science are at war, Gould is behaving exquisitely religiously: he is changing the evidence to fit his beliefs, rather than letting the evidence guide his beliefs. So the nonoverlapping magisteria idea is simply false. Its problems don’t stop there, however. How can anyone suggest that religion alone provides purposes, meanings, and values? I know plenty of atheists whose lives hum with meaning. They get this meaning from the obvious places: their families, their jobs, their hobbies. Atheists, or even just agnostics who don’t much care about religion, get meaning from doing science, making art and music, climbing mountains, learning to juggle, raising children, working on their marriage, and so forth and so on. And Mother Theresa’s pathetic inner life proves that religion cannot be guaranteed to supply meaning. Mother Theresa is to be commended for getting up each morning and continuing her work even though inwardly she was bereft of God and hence lacking the deep meaning she thought should be hers.8 She got meaning and purpose from her work, just like an atheist. All her religion did was make her feel miserable about that. Atheists’ lives also can brim with important values. In chapter 7, we saw that purely rational, natural motives can ground two kinds of robust morality and ethical conduct (the happy consequences view and the duty view). Again, religion isn’t 104

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needed. And given that religion is and has been the source of profound evil on this planet, it is hard to take seriously the idea that religion can supply good values at all independently of nonreligious monitoring and oversight. Significant segments of the world’s most dominant religions teach intolerance. Obviously, they are not teaching good, moral values. Finally, given this tendency toward intolerance, the very discussion of values and purpose that Gould claims is the province of religion is simply not there. So, not only does the magisterium of religion robustly overlap with the magisterium of science, making factual claims that science refutes, but religion also cannot even deliver on what Gould claims it can deliver on: conducting enlightening discussion within the magisterium of meanings, purpose, and values. Here are examples of questions that fall within religion’s magisteria that Gould presents (p. 54): Are we worth more than bugs or bacteria because we have evolved a much more complex neurology? Under what conditions (if ever) do we have the right to drive another species to extinction by elimination of their habitats? Do we violate any moral codes when we use genetic technology to place a gene from one creature into the genome of another species? How can religion answer these, or even discuss them intelligently? Take the first one. Christianity and Islam, at least, say humans have souls. Bugs don’t. Ergo, humans are worth more than bugs (souls are either intrinsically valuable, like beauty or truth, or valuable because they are holy, and being holy is intrinsically valuable). This is horrendous reasoning. How do we know bugs don’t have souls? How do we know humans do? And it is humans that say souls are intrinsically valuable, so the entire argument is question-begging and self-serving. Perhaps just being alive is intrinsically valuable. If so, then bugs are intrinsically valuable. (By the way, notice that the claim that we but not bugs have souls is a factual claim about the world, and the “factual” issue of who does and who does not have a soul has been the source of almost infinite suffering.) In truth, these very questions arise because of our advancing science. Gould is certainly correct that science alone cannot answer them (probably), but he is wrong to conclude that therefore only religion can. In fact, he’s wrong to think that religion can shed any light on them at all. He’s completely excluded the dominant and 105

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most just venue for answering these questions, the one we humans have relied on since we first started asking them: reasonable people coming together, calmly discussing their arguments both for and against each side, assessing all the evidence, weighing the options, and working out compromises. Some of these reasonable people will be religious, but progress will be made only if they leave their religion at home or are able to compromise. We can conclude, therefore, that Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria is an idea that does not and cannot work. Since Gould’s idea appears to be among the best of the “cut the Janus-faced head in two” option, we can safely conclude that this option is very unlikely to work. This leaves us with option three . . .

Accept the Fact That We Are Janus-Faced

When I say accept this fact, I mean explicitly accept it. Accepting this fact this way, I think, is somewhat difficult. It requires that we explicitly and openly accept the existence of a robust and disturbing diversity within each of us, individually. Within each of us there are opposing natures. We are not just inclined to be religious and scientifically rational, we are both religious and scientifically rational. Furthermore, these natures are not just opposing, but contradictory. Being scientifically rational requires seeking evidence, especially evidence refuting a specific belief. It requires taking this evidence seriously and changing our beliefs if the evidence demands it. Being religious requires us to ignore evidence, especially refuting evidence. Being scientifically rational requires us to look for natural causes of events. Being religious requires us to look for supernatural (nonnatural) causes of events. Being religious requires us to think that there is something holy either in the world or behind the world. Being scientific requires viewing the world as flatly natural. This is a contradiction in our nature. The difficulty in accepting our Janus natures runs deep. Though we have contradictory natures, many of us Janus-faced hominids would flatly deny this and, in fact, would deny that our religious and scientific natures are contradictory in any way. In a recent, fascinating paper, psychologists have unearthed evidence that religious and scientific explanations happily coexist in many humans.9 That is, many of us 106

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Janus-faced hominids openly and without any unease embrace both religious and scientific explanations for events, even for the same event (a serious illness is a good example). The psychologists found that far from being thought of as or felt to be contradictory, we Janus-faced beings view our own two Janus natures as distinct, complementary, and quite compatible and consistent. Indeed, the psychologists found that scientific knowledge doesn’t replace religious knowledge; rather, we fold our religious explanations and our scientific ones together in ingenious, complicated ways. For example, we might hold that a serious ailment that we have is caused by some (sub)microscopic agent, for example, a bacterium or a virus, but also hold that the fact that we came into contact with such an infectious agent in the first place was due to supernatural causes. Whether we acknowledge it or not, this biologicalcum-supernatural view of disease is contradictory.The supernatural and the natural are two radically different realms. The kind of explicit acceptance I am asking for requires acknowledging that scientific causal explanations and religious causal explanations are different in kind. It requires acknowledging that we use both kinds. Beyond certain boundaries, we suspend disbelief, we suspend our critical thinking and our “dubious-until-proven-believable” attitude which has always stood us in good stead from the beginning. Beyond those boundaries, we enter the supernatural and embrace causal explanations and causes that would be refuted or denied, were they within the scientific boundary. Why do we do this? How do we do it? We already know how to answer these questions from chapter 5, at least to a good extent. Recall chapter 5’s Dennett-Wilson theory. We each have, naturally and genetically, a sort of fiction-generating device that produces weird explanations. We saw in chapter 5 two ways in which these weird explanations help knit groups together: by providing a quasi-secret bond known to and accepted only by the group, and by supplying a moral authority for the leaders of the group. But there is one other thing that weird explanations do: they supply control (as we saw in the appendix to chapter 5). We humans need control desperately—Earth is a very dangerous place. And as the writer(s) of the Book of Job noted, far worse than mere danger is the capriciousness of the danger. Probabilities, chance, and luck govern a large part of what we do. We fear the danger, but we are also haters of chance, of probabilities, and of the unexplained and 107

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unexplainable. Control allows us to, if not destroy bad luck and chance, at least (seem) to hold them at bay, especially in the matters that concern us the most: our lives and the lives of those we care about. Let’s consider the control explanations give us.

A L L H U M A N S , T H E J A N U S - F A C E D and those rare few who have only one face, love—love!—explanations. Why? Because explanations, either of the scientific, religious, or just mundane variety, show us how things work, and thereby give us power over our world. For the power of control afforded by scientific explanations, we need look no further than medicine. It is far, far better to have any disease in the early twenty-first century than in the early twentieth, or even in the late twentieth for many diseases. This is control of the most important sort: we can cure or strongly control illnesses today that killed us a century ago. Beyond medicine, we can look at weather prediction, transportation, economics, clinical psychology and psychiatry, astronomy, engineering, and so on as evidence of the profound control science gives us. That we humans can do this is a marvelous wonder to behold. That so many regard this wonder as boring and mundane, or that so many fail to notice it at all, is one of the great tragedies of humankind. But it is the control afforded by religion that is the real wonder. We come to embrace our weird explanations in large part because of group cohesion (evolutionary) reasons. But we also embrace them because they give us control. The weird explanations always introduce weird agents or entities of some sort, deities, for example. Coming to believe a weird explanation is coming to believe in the existence of a weird entity. Once we come to the conclusion that there exists some sort of supernatural, weird entity, we then conclude that it is at least somewhat like us—that is, that this entity has some agent-like properties that make it something like us: it is jealous and vengeful, it can perceive events and hear supplications, it recognizes us and other things in the world, it likes beer, it relishes ram’s or bull’s blood or female virgins, it hates betrayal and loves loyalty, and so on. Since we know how to deal with fellow humans, we know, at least partially, how to deal with this supernatural, weird entity. That’s control.

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Here is one example. Consider the plight of the ancient Jews. They followed Yahweh out of Egypt (just assume this; there is very little evidence of any whole population of Jews held in bondage in Egypt, and even less evidence of a mass exodus). Whatever the facts, the Jews eventually did settle Canaan, and over time founded at least two kingdoms, one of which was Israel. However, they had trouble remaining in control, and even staying there. Every time they were conquered during this period of their history, prophets would show up and explain that what had gone wrong was that they, the Jews, had not been properly following God’s laws. In other words, their being conquered was their fault, not God’s, and it was not even really due to the skill of the various conquerors. If the Jews would but fully and correctly obey God’s laws—not just obey the letter of his laws, but obey in spirit as well—then all the deadly conquering would stop. Think of the power this gave the Jews. They were masters of their fate; they only had to follow God’s laws closely enough. Every religion can provide similar control. In the late nineteenth century, Native American Ghost Dances flourished because it was believed that they would remove the white invaders (and others) and restore Native Americans to power over their own land and lives. Control. . . . Beyond this vast sort of “control,” every religion provides for more local, more mundane control, for example, the Navajo prayers for a good hunt (for deer). But let’s consider this control honestly. The Ghost Dances didn’t work. Apparently it isn’t possible to follow Yahweh’s laws closely enough to win his favor. And I personally know many a successful (though admittedly non-Navajo) hunter who not only doesn’t pray for a good hunt, but considers the notion ludicrous. So, where’s the control? the power? We are now up against one of the strangest aspects of humankind. It is the illusion of control that matters, not actual control. Why would we care about the illusion of control and not the real thing—real control? Well, of course, we do care about real control. But for some reason, we confuse the illusion with the real thing. We are so in need of control—it is, to repeat, a dangerous, capricious planet—that feeling in control, even if we aren’t, is far better than admitting that we are not in control, or are in control only to some small extent. It is as if, to get out of bed in the morning, we have to have some sort of assurance that

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the floor’s still there to stand on. Of course, almost no one (except a philosopher) worries about whether the bedroom floor still exists in the morning. But people do worry about whether the rains will come and water their crops, or whether the rains will stop before everything is destroyed by floods. So, we seek control. This is perfectly rational. The strange part, and the part where rationality seems sidelined, is that we find control. Someone in the tribe is bound to have a good hunt, at least eventually, and come home with a deer. That one deer is proof of the control that chanting to the gods gives the tribe’s hunters. We humans do this over and over. We take the merest evidence as proof of the control we need to get through the day. Remember, after Hurricane Katrina, belief in the Christian deity went up . . . among the survivors. But let’s consider another horrific event . . . the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These attacks produced a huge crop of bumper stickers saying “God Bless America.” We had lost control, and sought to get it back by appealing to our god (who, make no mistake, is the Christian deity—God). Rather than using the September 11 attacks as evidence for the nonexistence of God, many Americans used it as proof that we needed to regain control in the only way we could and should: reconnecting with God. Our religious face, in such cases, might seem like collective insanity. But it’s not. Living without any sense of deep control is simply too scary for most of us—primally scary. Rather, saying “God bless America” is doing at least two things . . . two things that even one-faced atheists acknowledge as real: it is connecting with something that obviously exists (the group, the country, one’s fellow citizens); and it is finding in this connection with others a real and powerful natural control over our feelings of fear as well as some real control over events. Remember, it is, in part, the United States’s response to the September 11 attacks that deterred further Al Qaeda attacks at that time, and this response was strongly supported by most US citizens. Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 6, there is a strong connection between religion and morality, especially when the latter is construed as primarily consisting in loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. So, saying “God bless America” is avowing loyalty to the United States and its citizens, and avowing respect for the country’s authority and the purity (or perhaps nobility) of its cause. This behavior is obviously rational, especially at the group 110

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level, and especially in the presence of danger. So, our religious face isn’t as irrational as it seems. Still, there is something strange going on here: Why not be absolutely direct and honest? Why didn’t everyone drive around with “I avow loyalty to the United States; I respect its authority; and I embrace the purity of its cause”? Well, aside from the fact that this would be a bumper cover and not just a quickly read bumper sticker, it doesn’t cut to the heart of the matter. Remember, we humans are religious genetically—in our deepest natures. It simply won’t do to say, “I avow loyalty to the United States. . . .” We have to say this by saying, “God bless America.” But once we say this, of course, we are in the grip of a weird explanation and a weird agent: an agent that will bless us on September 12, but didn’t have the insight or strength or moral backbone to bless us on September 10. So we are stuck with our Janus-faces . . . both of them.We are rational and embrace the natural and we are non? . . . ir? . . . extra? . . . rational and embrace the supernatural. We control nature via our knowledge, some of which is profound and deep (engineering and science). We control the supernatural (or at least try to get it to work for us) by appealing in various ways to our gods, our deities, and our familiars. And, finally, we marry the two: we control the supernatural in order to control the natural. We appeal to our religious, weird entities to control disease, war, the weather, our finances, and everything else we can think of. And this control is real . . . as long as we ignore all refuting evidence. So, with the journey in shambles, why not just give up? Soberly considered, there is nothing to search for. Religion is both part of our biology (and so something we cannot get rid of) and something we feel. Internally—this religion phenotype manifests itself as a felt connection with something . . . something big . . . something supernatural possibly, but definitely something you can’t usually see on a common stroll down the street. Furthermore, religion sharply and stridently clashes with our rational mind.We humans are adept—we are grand masters—at finessing contradictions.This mother of all contradictions sits happily in our heads, pushing and pulling us in contradictory directions. Instead of journeying, perhaps we should just get on with the business of explicitly coming to terms with the fact that we are Janus-faced, and try to control this, or live with it, as best as we can.

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PA RT F O U R

The Heretic’s Way INTO THE MYSTERIOUS REALM

The Killing of a Titan O N S E P T E M B E R 3 0 , 2011, the United States closed its mightiest atom smasher, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The Tevatron was, in fact, the world’s highest energy collider . . . until it was surpassed by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which came online March 30, 2010. During its time, the Tevatron was one of the most important and complicated machines humans had ever built. More importantly, the Tevatron did some of the deepest physics ever. Its chief accomplishment was the discovery of the top quark, a fundamental particle crucial to proving correct the Standard Model (the rather boring name physicists give their theory of fundamental particles, among which are particles with quite nonboring names like “quark,” “gluon,” “boson,” and “hadron”—physicists are like that). Finding the top quark allowed physicists to complete their required list of the six quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. . . . So, you’d think the Tevatron’s epitaph would be glowing . . . in the extreme. But no. Here is the epitaph of the Tevatron collider: “Its legacy is a mixed bag: The Tevatron produced a lot of excellent science but yielded no surprises to make physicists rethink their standard model of the fundamental particles and forces” (my italics).1

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Think of it, one of most stunning machines ever built, dismissed with a quick handshake and a cheap gold watch. Why? Because physicists, like everyone else on the planet, like a good mystery. They like— indeed, they need—to know that there’s more to the universe than meets the eye. If physics can reduce the entire universe to the complexity and compellingness of your sock drawer, then perhaps life really is meaningless: you’re born, you get your PhD, you slam a few particles together, you die. The Tevatron deserved better, it deserved a presidential send-off and a tip of hat from the world. But the epitaph reveals as much about us as the Tevatron revealed about the universe. It revealed our longing for not knowledge of facts, but knowledge that our factual knowledge falls short of all that the universe has to offer.

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TEN

Some Strangeness in the Proportion

W E A R E J A N U S - F A C E D . This is quite a strange fact about us. We owe our successful evolution in part to our religious proclivities, yet these same religious proclivities may kill us. So, for many of us, our two sides are at war (see chapter 9)—not only over the evidence for our religions, but over the moral problems religions create. One wonders if our evolution was worth the trouble. But this question is moot, now. We are here and we are going to be around at least long enough to utterly alter Earth and ourselves. However, our being Janus-faced doesn’t mean that there isn’t something else out there—something that might be a worthy replacement for our religious strivings; something which our religious face might do well to turn toward. . . . There is indeed something out there. What it is, I cannot say. But I can point to it. That’s what this chapter is about. I will discuss in detail three mysterious things: consciousness, infinity, and the rarity of the commonplace. My goal is to lay bare the strange nature of these three in such a way that you, the reader, can experience it in some depth. At the end of the chapter, I hope to have upset any blithe nonchalance you may have about these three seemingly ordinary things that surround you. And of course, these three are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. These mysteries are, I claim, the excellent beauties. And they reveal that our world is not flatly natural. I am not denying that the flatly natural worldview has room for beauty. It clearly does. There are beautiful

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explanations for such things as how flowers bloom or how dinosaurs lived their lives. And science reveals beautiful hidden processes like photosynthesis, pollination, and embryogenesis, for example. But the flatly natural view is committed to the notion that, at least ideally, science will leave nothing of importance unexplained. The flatly natural view insists that all scientific beauty must supervene on scientific understanding. But this is wrong. The excellent beauties show that there is far more to our world than what is revealed by scientific understanding. And yet it is science itself that reveals the excellent beauties. So, what we can see from our scientific vantage point greatly exceeds what we can comprehend from it. The specific things I want to draw your attention to may strike you as irrelevant to a spiritual journey. But they are relevant, especially now after we’ve seen how utterly mundane and natural all our current religions really are. In chapters 11, 12 and 13, we will discuss why these phenomena are relevant to a journey that might be called “spiritual,” at least in some sense. For now, I encourage you to let these examples wash over you. And at the end of the chapter, try to see behind and beyond the specific details of the three examples to what they have in common, to what they point to. Let the mere existence of these examples be a source of wonder. I want to stress that the mysteries I am going to discuss exist independently of both our religious face and our rational one. They exist objectively for all to see. The mysteries are real . . . and they are trying to tell us something.

The Conscious Self

What is consciousness? I don’t mean anything unusual or strange by the word “consciousness” (see chapter 1). Consciousness—or being conscious—is the most ordinary thing in your life . . . so ordinary, you rarely note it or think of it. Consciousness is the way the world seems to you, the way we experience it, feel it. Taste an apple, see a sunset, smell a rose or an angry skunk, stub your toe on the foot of the bed frame at 4:00 am, hear your dog breathe or a baby gurgle and coo. These are conscious experiences. We have experiences because we are conscious. Or, rather, our having them constitutes our being conscious. 116

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Being conscious is what makes it fun or horrible or merely boring to be a human (or anything else that is conscious). Using a phrase that the philosopher Thomas Nagel made famous (among philosophers), we can say that a being is conscious when there is something it is like to be that being.1 The problems with consciousness begin right with its definition. To define consciousness, I can only point to what I assume are your conscious experiences. Or I can point to mine and assume that you have similar ones. That is, the only way I can define consciousness is by appealing to something I can only assume you have. There is no more-robust, scientific, third-person definition available. I have to say: “Look up at the cloudless sky. That color you are experiencing is blue. Your experience of blue is an example of being conscious, of conscious experience.” Or: “Stand on the beach. That repetitious, mild roaring sound you hear is the sound of waves coming in on the beach. Your experience of that roar is an example of being conscious, of conscious experience.” . . . That’s the best I, or anyone else, can do. This ostensive definition-plus-assuming is the same one researchers have been using to define consciousness since research of any sort was first conducted on it. And it is the same one consciousness researchers use today. It’s all this assuming that is the problem. I can’t know what you in fact experience when you look up into the clear blue sky. Let’s contrast this with something else that is weird about consciousness, but that we do know exists via verbal reports. When you hear the waves hitting the beach, you may also see the sound as certain colors. For example, the sound of waves may also be experienced visually as, say, the color indigo. Some humans (and, for all we know, other animals) routinely have such mixed conscious sensory experiences. The phenomenon is called synesthesia.2 We know synesthesia exists because the people who experience it tell us. But here, as with nonsynesthetes like you (probably) and me, I have to assume that the synesthetes experience the sound of the waves as indigo. When they say, “I hear the waves and see this sound as indigo,” I have to take them at their word. I cannot know the actual content of the synesthete’s experience, just as I cannot know the content of your experiences, nor you mine. This assuming leaves a lot of room for differences between us all. The color you see when you look at the sky may be the same color I see when I look at the green trees in a forest, or when I look at the 117

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rind of a grapefruit. This phenomenon is called color inversion and is quite different from synesthesia. For one thing, we have zero evidence that color inversion exists, and furthermore, it would be impossible to get any evidence. Suppose the colors I see are just the reverse of yours—our spectra are inverted, as the philosophers say. So I see the color yellow where you see blue. But we both look in the direction of the clear summer sky and say, “Blue.” We have both been taught that the color of the sky is picked out by the word “blue.” And we use that word regardless of what color we actually see. And I, like you, will say that the color of the sky is the same as the color of deep water: blue. But I will see yellow as the color of deep water. I will also say things like this: “Though they are called ‘blueberries,’ blueberries are not really blue like the sky but closer to purple like violets.” This is exactly what you say (give or take some arguing about the purpleness of blueberries—perhaps they are violet or indigo). But where you see blue and purple, I see yellow and a shade of red or orange. No one, and certainly not I, can know that my color spectrum is inverted relative to yours, perhaps relative to everyone’s. No report of any color experience I have can inform you or anyone else of our inverted spectra. In fact, this inversion could describe things way too simply. It could well be that every single human sees a different color when he or she looks into the clear noon sky. At this point, you might ask, “Well, what about neuroscience or psychology? Can’t they help determine if we are all seeing blue when we look at the sky?” The answer is that neither is of any help at all. This is the essence of the strangeness and mystery of consciousness— psychology, neuroscience, whatever, cannot be of any help, ever. This claim is controversial, of course, but not as controversial as you might think. It is safe to say that most scientists working on consciousness are what philosophers call materialists or physicalists: most scientists think that consciousness, the self, conscious awareness, and a few other related phenomena are all the physical result of physical (or material) processes in our bodies; in particular, consciousness is thought to be due to neural processes in brains. Just as heat (like temperature in general) is the result of rapidly jostling molecules, consciousness is the result of the brain doing . . . ?? . . . something . . . (this list here of hypothesized somethings is disturbingly large, as we will see). Perhaps even you believe that consciousness is due to some physical brain process. Nevertheless, physi118

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calism about consciousness is quite possibly false. And in any case, the evidence for it is far too weak to grant physicalism the status of a confirmed scientific theory. Let’s look more deeply into this matter. The result will be an appreciation of consciousness’s profound weirdness.

I T I S A S I M P L E , B R U T E F A C T that early-twenty-first-century science doesn’t know what neural processes consciousness is associated with (I’ll use “science” as a catch-all term to denote neuroscience and psychology and any other science one might care to deploy in the quest to understand consciousness, like quantum physics). The list of candidates proposed by scientists to explain consciousness is embarrassingly large. Here are some of them: attention, autobiographical memory, being awake, body-based perspectivalness, episodic memory, executive processing, feedback, feature integration, 40 Hz neural oscillations in human brains, high-level encoding, intentionality (as in intending to do something), intentionality (as in a thought’s content or its being about something in the world), metaprocessing, mind-based perspectivalness, neural competition, quantum effects in the microtubules of neurons, recursivity, reflective self-awareness, reportability, salience, and sense of self. It is rare in any science of any type to have such a long list of hypothesized causes of some phenomenon. But the truly alarming thing about this list is not how long it is, but how diverse it is. It contains proposed hypotheses that are themselves deeply mysterious and so of no help at all (for example, sense of self), along with actual measurable neural processes (for example, 40 Hz pulses), along with actual measurable psychological processes (for example, episodic memory), along with some very eyebrow-raising physics (for example, quantum effects of the microtubules of the neurons in one’s brain)—all of which have so far produced no viable theory of consciousness. But, in truth, everything on this list is a waste of time: science cannot touch consciousness. The list of things about consciousness that we cannot explain is not just huge—it is absolutely every single thing associated with consciousness. Scientists cannot explain at all how the five senses work to produce sounds of ocean waves or visions of the color indigo. Scientists know how to numb neurons for light surgery and, for more serious surgery, the anesthesiologist can put you to “sleep.” But no scientist anywhere knows why the gases and chemicals remove

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consciousness, either in part or more completely. We don’t even know why aspirin makes headaches go away.We know it works, and we know in some detail what aspirin does, neurochemically. But we don’t know why those neurochemical reactions are or cause the cessation of pain. Neurochemical knowledge is essentially pointless when it comes to explaining experience. No one knows why whisky or wine or any other such chemicals have the effect that they have. No one knows why LSD or marijuana do what they do. No one knows why love or orgasms feel the way they do. No one knows how neural processes produce sadness or grief. No scientist knows why Prozac or Xanax or any of the drugs used to treat any mental illness or condition do what they do. And no one knows what neural processes produce joy or ecstatic spiritual knowledge. Again, much of the neural chemistry of all of these is known; scientists know a great deal about how these chemicals work on the neurons in the brain and the rest of the body. But all this neurochemistry is useless for explaining why these chemicals have the effect on conscious experience that they have. These experiences are what matter, and we cannot explain them. It is not that scientists don’t know vast quantities of stuff about neurons, neural architectures, neural processes, brains, psychological processes, psychological states, and so on. They certainly do: attend a neuroscience conference or read an issue of Science and you’ll quickly find out how much they know; it’s immense and very technical. For example, they know much about the neural processes underlying vision, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touch. But they are clueless about why those neurons, those neural processes, produce the conscious visual experiences that they do. No one knows why neural firings produce pain, nor why a headache hurts differently from a punch in the face. The anesthesiologist knows tons about what the gases and chemicals she’s putting into you do to your neurons and brain. But she has no clue at all about why doing those things to your brain and neurons makes you lose consciousness to such an extent that a heart surgeon can open up your chest while you lie perfectly still. No clue. And I am not exaggerating one whit; I’m being literal and precise. Contrast this with cars. It would be strange indeed if mechanics knew a ton about how cars are put together, but didn’t know why turning the key in the ignition started cars. They in fact know in detail why turning the ignition key works. And some know what’s going 120

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on down to the electron level. That’s good if you own a car, especially one that’s not starting. More deeply, it shows what human knowledge can accomplish. That we can know something so thoroughly is one of the very best things about humans. But human knowledge can’t touch consciousness.3 You are probably dubious. Surely, you say, if science can’t explain consciousness now, it will eventually, perhaps even soon. Perhaps you even think that nothing is intrinsically beyond science’s purview. I’ve had many a discussion with cognitive scientists and neuropsychologists who of course agree that science cannot now explain consciousness, but who think it will before the next decade (next fifty years, next century) is over. (Different researchers provide different lengths of time.) I call this the “just wait until next year” claim; it should be called the “just wait until next year” blind faith. Just wait until next year. . . . we can wait until the next millennium for all the good it will do. Here are two intuition exercises (similar to thought experiments) to show that consciousness is beyond explaining. As luck would have it, there are two very popular movies that make this exercise fun. The first will exercise what is called your Cartesian intuition (named after René Descartes). This is the intuition that your conscious experiences could be just what they are no matter what the world is really like. I am confident that you have this intuition; it is well known that most people have it. The famous movie The Matrix is founded on exactly this intuition, and in fact is an extended, multimillion-dollar celebration of it. In the movie, the entire human population is really living out pathetic “lives” encased in billions and billions of underground coffins filled with some sort of life-sustaining goo. Each hairless body in each coffin is attached to a world-sized computer that directly gives all of our brains the experience of living our lives on the real surface of Earth sometime around the turn of the second millennium ce (common era). The “reality” we all know and love—life on planet Earth—is entirely simulated: no one has even once actually used his or her eyes, or any other sense organ, to sense anything. We are all in one large, collective computer dream. In the twenty-first century, we could call this the Matrix intuition, but the famous philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) beat the Wachowskis to it (by a few years). Descartes imagined an evil demon manipulating our senses (note: not our sense organs [for these 121

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are physical things we believe we have] but the actual conscious experiences associated with our five senses) in various ways in order to deceive us into believing that we have human bodies and are walking around doing things. In fact, we have no bodies at all. Reality as we conceive it is an illusion. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes this demon thusly: “as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, . . . [he] has directed his entire effort to misleading me.” Why would such a demon spend his life (or eternity) doing such a thing? Why because he is an evil demon. (In The Matrix, the builders of the matrix have a much better reason, it turns out.) (There’s a tiny wrinkle we need to discuss. I claimed that Descartes said the evil demon manipulated our senses, not our sense organs. He was careful about this because, in truth, we may not have sense organs, or at least not the ones we think we have, if the evil demon is fooling us. A good way to imagine this is to think that we are just nonphysical, disembodied spirits—ghosts—being fooled by the demon. But in The Matrix, humans in fact have human bodies; it is our brains and sensorimotor systems that are being stimulated in the right way to fool us into thinking we are reading a book on religion and scientific mysteries. The Matrix is a lot more believable nowadays, a lot more easy to imagine, than Descartes’s disembodied/evil demon version [in fact living in a matrix may well be in our future, if AI and research into virtual realities unfold in a certain way].4 We have trouble with the disembodied version because we tend to think of the evil demon as using some sort of physical apparatus on us, and we find it hard to imagine causally affecting something nonphysical [our ghost selves or our spirits] with something physical. But perhaps the evil demon isn’t using something physical on us. He/she/it is using something nonphysical, perhaps magic. If that works for you, great. I invite you to use either The Matrix or Descartes’s evil demon version to pump up your Cartesian intuition. Either will work fine.) The Cartesian intuition is easily and naturally held simply because we all dream at night. You are hang gliding in the beautiful Himalayas . . . but no, you are asleep in your bed, dreaming. Perhaps you have never hang glided in Himalayas, or perhaps you’ve never hang glided anywhere. Perhaps you don’t intend to; perhaps you don’t even want to. But there you are anyway—soaring between Chomolungma and Nuptse. But dreams aren’t “real.” So we all know that we can easily 122

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experience something quite robustly even though we aren’t “really” doing what it takes to actually have that experience (for example, we aren’t actually hang gliding in the Himalayas). The Cartesian intuition, then, sunders the connection between the world and your experiences. Or at least it shows that the connection between your experiences and the world is tenuous. You can experience anything, yet be doing basically nothing.You are not now actually reading this sentence, using physical paper and ink, and light, and your eyes. . . . No, you are encased somewhere in some vat of goo, being duped into thinking that you are actually reading this sentence. Or perhaps you are dreaming that you are reading this. Perhaps you are a computer, dreaming that you are a human reading about mysterious spiritual journeys. Of course, it is next to impossible to believe for any length of time that you are actually in a vat of goo in the matrix (or asleep in your bed or whatever). You think you are in the world, living your life, reading this sentence. This is a perfectly rational belief—if you didn’t have it, you’d probably be in a hospital somewhere being treated for some sort of mental illness. What the Cartesian intuition shows is that, though perfectly rational, your belief that you are living your life in the world is in fact a leap of faith—the connection between your experiences and the causes of those experiences is nowhere near as tight as you think. In fact, as far as you know, there’s no connection at all. Though the Cartesian intuition discombobulates matters considerably, we can discombobulate matters further. To completely sunder the connection between consciousness and the world, we can assume that life is really as we experience it, that there is no matrix, and that our brains are filled with neurons . . . just as it seems. Now, we will work to imagine neurons doing their neuronal thing with no consciousness at all. We will clearly and cleanly imagine a being of some sort living a robust life, traveling hither and yon, doing this and that, with neurons abuzz, yet with no consciousness at all. This is where the second intuition exercise comes in. And the second movie. Philosophers have a technical term for creatures that have bodies— neurons, brains, and sense organs—but experience nothing: zombies. Zombies are very important in philosophical discussions of consciousness, because they seem to show that one can be fully embodied and alive and yet completely inert on the inside. (I don’t mean inside their 123

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skulls: zombies’ neurons work perfectly well. By “inert on the inside” I mean zombies lack a self that is the locus of conscious experience. Note: philosophy zombies are very different from monster zombies portrayed in popular fiction.) To use Nagel’s phrase: there is nothing it is like to be a zombie—or, using a slight variation, being a zombie is just like being a doorknob: experience-less. Well, how easy is it to imagine zombies? Can one legitimately imagine them? The zombie intuition, the intuition that zombies could exist here and now on planet Earth, is not as easy to come by as the Cartesian intuition. Fortunately, Hollywood has helped out here, too. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Barbossa and his mutinous band of miscreants are cursed men. After stealing quite a bit of sacred Aztec gold (which had had a curse placed on it by the Aztec gods—understandable given Cortez’s behavior), Barbossa and his men discover that though they can feel profound, gnawing hunger, choking thirst, and consuming lust, they cannot in any way satisfy their cravings. In fact, they can’t feel or sense much of anything, not the wind on their faces, nor the smell of the salt air. They can only feel the three desires just discussed and pain. Come to find out, though by day they seem to have bodies and skin and organs, in the light of the full moon, one can see what they really are: corroding skeletons. Barbossa is not a zombie . . . not quite. He can still feel some things (and of course, he doesn’t have neurons, at least by the light of the full moon—we will let that slip, however). But we can use Barbossa to construct a zombie, a zombiefied Barbossa. Here goes. . . . Let us first assume that Barbossa can feel nothing at all. He forces Ms. Turner to take off her dress before he forces her to walk the plank (never fear, Pirates is rated PG-13, so Ms. Turner remains fully clothed at all times, in a totally modest undergarment of some sort). He leeringly says of the dress, “Mmmm . . . still warm . . .” When he does so, he (Barbossa) cannot actually feel the warmth still in the dress. So how can he correctly say, “Still warm”? Well, his body can still process the information that the dress is warm, much like a thermometer could. Thermometers aren’t conscious (as far as we know), yet they accurately register temperature. Barbossa’s bodily heat sensors work like that. Though one can carry on a conversation with Captain Barbossa— he seems to see and hear you and responds accordingly—we can easily assume that he doesn’t have any visual or auditory experiences at all. His 124

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sense organs (such as they are) process the information that exists in the relevant light and sound, and Barbossa’s body (mouth, tongue, and vocal cords, for example) produces the right output . . . but during all of this, Barbossa experiences nothing. His ears pick up sounds like microphones, his eyes pick up light like cameras. Mechanisms process this information, but no experiences ever happen. The same is true, let us suppose, of smell and taste. Both of these work like chemical analyzers, checking for various chemicals and outputting the correct response, but no experience accompanies this information processing and this response. (In the movie, Barbossa can experience taste: referring to himself he says everything tastes of ashes. But let’s suppose that his taste experiences have also become zombiefied; he can taste nothing.) So, all five of his senses work just like some unconscious machine or device: thermometers (and various pressure-sensitive devices) for touch, microphones for hearing, cameras for vision, and chemical analyzers for smell and taste. On the inside, Barbossa’s experiences are only hunger, thirst, lust, and pain. He doesn’t even experience darkness. Now, if we remove his feelings of suffering—the hunger, thirst, lust, and pain—we get our zombie (in the movie, some of Barbossa’s pirates seem to experience pain when stabbed or hit). So, Captain Barbossa can be rendered as a philosophy zombie: a perfectly physical being who behaves in all the right ways all the time, just like you and me, but who is utterly inert on the inside. There is nothing it is like to be our zombiefied Barbossa. In fact, in many ways, it is far worse to be the actual Barbossa than the zombiefied Barbossa, since the actual pirate suffers hunger, thirst, and lust. (C3PO and R2D2 [from Star Wars] and Commander Data [from Star Trek: The Next Generation] might possibly also help you imagine zombies, but this is unlikely, since what really happened in those shows was that we all became convinced that robots [androids] could in fact be conscious. This intuition is just the opposite of the zombie intuition.) Still, you might be reluctant to grant that Barbossa, or any zombie, could behave perfectly correctly and yet be unconscious. I have an ace up my sleeve that will answer this reluctance. For all you know, your spouse, partner, best friend, dog, cat, and so on could be a zombie. Try this. Pick out someone near you now (actually, it helps if you pick out a stranger), and imagine that that person is an experience-less zombie, an unfeeling, conscious-less android of 125

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some sort, capable of all the right behavior but utterly inert on the inside. Imagine that there is nothing it is like to be the person you picked out.You know they behave appropriately, but you don’t know that they are conscious. The same is true of you and me: your consciousness is unavailable to me, and mine is unavailable to you. Consciousness is entirely and forever internal and personal. Your heart is internal, but I can make it external—heart surgeons do this routinely. Consciousness is forever internal to one person, particular to that person and that person only. This isolation gives rise to what philosophers call the problem of other minds: a person with a conscious mind, me for example, doesn’t know for sure that there are other conscious minds in the world; there might only be zombies. The problem of other minds arises when we come to the conclusion that behavior isn’t sufficient for knowledge that someone else—anyone else—is conscious. (Actually, the problem is more acute than doubting the consciousness of others, which is bad enough; others may also not have any thoughts at all, conscious or otherwise, for example, the thought “oh, it’s time to walk the dogs.” Everyone else may be very sophisticated puppets of some sort. We will skip this more virulent version of the zombie intuition.) We see that consciousness (and the mind in general) is very peculiar. Its hallmark is utter and eternal isolation. So, given everything you know about someone else—which is all derived from his or her behavior—that person might not have any consciousness at all. The person you are closest to, the person you love the most, might be a zombie. Your consciousness might be the only consciousness in the entire universe. Or perhaps my consciousness is the only consciousness in the entire universe. I can only be certain of my consciousness. From my perspective, which is the only one I am prepared to swear to, all the rest of the animals on planet Earth might be zombies.This isn’t solipsism (which is the view that only I exist), but it is disturbingly close, probably too close. I want to stress that for all you know, your own true love is a zombie. Note that it is impossible to prove that your spouse, say, is a zombie, just as it is impossible to prove that he or she is not a zombie. Imagine if someone asserted that you were a zombie. How would you refute them? Drop a bowling ball on your foot and then cry out in pain? Zombies can mimic this behavior exactly. Eat some yummy chocolate ice cream and say, “Yum?” Zombies can do that, too. State that, 126

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upon reading Excellent Beauty, you find consciousness to be mysterious? Again, easily replicable by a garden-variety zombie. Zombies, then, demonstrate that physical processes (for example, neural ones) can go on without consciousness existing at all. Zombies finish what the Cartesian intuition started: consciousness is now completely sundered from the physical.Your conscious mind is now shown to be independent of the world it inhabits and even of the very neural processes it seems most closely associated with. I’m not saying that you can believe this conclusion on a day-to-day basis. You will find it impossible to believe for any length of time that this book you are now reading isn’t really out there, in your hands, causing your book experiences. But I am saying that for brief moments of time, you can see that your consciousness could well be utterly independent of any world you think is out there. In fact, there need be no world out there at all. Now, it is easy to see that consciousness is mysterious indeed. But we aren’t done with consciousness yet. I said that human knowledge can’t touch consciousness. I meant that external, third-person knowledge can’t touch consciousness. In one very important sense, human knowledge not only can touch consciousness, human knowledge is constituted by it. Remember that your conscious experiences are forever beyond me. But they are you. You know nothing as securely as your own conscious states, your own experiences. Your consciousness, in fact, is the most important thing about you, for if you weren’t conscious, if you were a zombie, then there is an important and real sense in which you wouldn’t exist. That your physical body exists is the second most important fact about you. As I mentioned, your consciousness—the fact that there is something it is like to be you—is what makes your life worth living, or what makes you want to die right now, or quit reading and go get a sandwich. In fact, in some way that—big surprise!—no one understands, consciousness gives rise to or is somehow intimately associated with your ability to use language to mean and communicate things, to have knowledge, and to be moral. So, of course, all these are going to remain at least partially mysterious since consciousness is. (By the way, their deep connection to consciousness explains why these three remain philosophical problems and not the problems of some science.) And most importantly, conscious is crucially tied to your self—that inner nexus of perception and control which is you. The self is another locus of mystery. In fact, in these physicalist 127

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times, many philosophers deny that there is any such thing as the self.5 That’s how utterly strange the self and (its?) consciousness are: one can be a conscious self and yet in (apparently) good conscience deny that one is a conscious self.

Infinity and Beyond

Approximately how many infinities would you say there are? Let’s make things as simple as possible: let’s restrict our discussion of infinity to numbers, to mathematics. I know this might put some people off, but at least with numbers, matters are quite precise. It is this very precision however, that makes things here startling, perhaps even unsettling. 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . these are the counting numbers (let’s deal with 0 later). We all use them every day: to tell time, to handle money, to solve important problems in our lives. We all know that there are an infinite number of them—they go on forever (you can always add 1 to any counting number to get the next biggest number). The counting numbers are made up of even numbers (numbers cleanly divisible by 2) and odd numbers. There are an infinite number of even numbers and an infinite number of odd numbers. So we get: 2 4 6 8. . . 1 3 5 7. . . . We can put all these sequences in alignment: 1 2 3 4 ... 2 4 6 8 ... 1 3 5 7. . . . One can see by this alignment that for every counting number, there is an even number and the same is true for the odds. And we can see that for every even (and odd) number, there is a counting number. We can conclude that there are exactly as many counting numbers as even numbers and odd numbers.Yet, the even numbers are a strict subset of the counting numbers, as are the odd numbers. By this, I mean that the even numbers are only a part of the counting numbers (same with the odds); yet, though the evens are only a part of the counting numbers, and though a part is always smaller than the whole, there are exactly as many of both of them. How is that possible? Well, it has to do with infinity. Ahhh . . . but which infinity? 128

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One of the things counting numbers count is how many members sets have. In fact, you can think of counting numbers as only counting sets of things. There are (probably) 10 fingers on your two hands. We can think of your hands as making up a set of hands with 2 members. We can think of your fingers as making up a set of 10 fingers. If you count the number of people you work with or the number of red cars in a city parking lot, you are counting the number of members of sets of people and cars, respectively. Mathematicians call such numbers cardinal numbers. Cardinal numbers tell us how many things there are. The cardinal number (or just cardinality) of your set of fingers is 10, of your hands is 2. The cardinal number of the set of your heads is 1—that is, you have 1 head (unless you’re Zaphod Beeblebrox, of course). Mathematicians have a number that they use to count all the counting numbers . . . all infinity of them. This number is ℵ0 (pronounced “aleph naught” or “aleph null”—the subscript 0 [null] is going to be important). Where you might write ∞, mathematicians, being more precise, will write ℵ0. As we will see, ∞ is ambiguous. Mathematicians therefore say that there are ℵ0 counting numbers, or, slightly more precisely, that the cardinality of the set of counting numbers is ℵ0. The cardinality of the evens and odds is also ℵ0. So, the size of the (set of) counting numbers and the size of the (sets of ) evens and odds are the same—ℵ0—even though the evens are only a part of the counting numbers, and even though, usually, a part is smaller than the whole. “Fine,” you say, “sometimes parts are the same size as the whole; infinity is bit strange. . . .” Well, the counting numbers, as you know, aren’t all the numbers. We frequently find that there are 0 things in some set. The size of the set of gold bars in your basement is (probably) 0. We are missing 0. If you cut an apple in half, you have 2 halves. A dime is .1 of a US dollar. We are missing the fractions. If you are in debt to, say, your bank to the tune of $10,000 for your recently purchased (used) car, then you have −$10,000. If you have $1 in your pocket, and buy $2 worth of candy, then you are −$1 in debt (hopefully you are with a friend with +$1). We’re missing the negative numbers, too. And we are missing the negative fractions. Adding 0 is easy. There is only one 0. We can consider it to be even and odd. So, adding 0 won’t change anything. 129

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1 2 3 4 5 ... 0 2 4 6 8 ... 0 1 3 5 7. . . . There are still ℵ0 numbers in each sequence. How many fractions are there? Infinity. How many negative numbers (including the negative fractions)? Infinity. Yes, but are there ℵ0 of them all or more than ℵ0? It seems as if there must be more than ℵ0 of them. If you put into one set all the counting numbers, zero, the negative versions of the counting numbers, and all the positive and negative fractions, you get a set of numbers that mathematicians call the rationals (they are called this because every number in the set can be represented by a ratio of integers, that is, counting numbers or their negatives: for example, 2/3, 2/1, 4/2, -78/193, and so on). Okay, so the question is, how many rationals are there? Surprisingly, there are ℵ0 of them. This is strange because intuitively the rationals ought to be far larger than just the counting numbers (which lack all the negative numbers and all the fractions). Here’s the proof.6 Consider the array in figure 10.1 below: This array contains the entire set of rationals (of course only a few are actually written down). First, there’s zero. Then the first row has all the positive and negative whole numbers, then the second row has all the positive and negative fractions with 2 as the denominator, the third row has all the positive and negative fractions with 3 as the denominator, and so on. The first column has only 1s in the numerator, the second, only −1s, the third only 2s, and the fourth only −2s, and so on. Given any rational number whatsoever, we can find it in this array (of course, this might take a while . . . perhaps the life of the universe up till now, but in principle we can find any number in the array). The array, by the way, contains some redundancy. For example, 1 is represented by 1, 2/2, 3/3, 4/4 . . . 145/145 . . . and so forth; there are other redundancies, too, such as 2/3 and 4/6. This is okay, and won’t affect anything since, as mentioned in figure 10.1, the redundancies are avoided. So far so good. Now, we know that there are ℵ0 counting numbers. So if we can place each counting number starting with 1 with exactly one rational number, and if we can guarantee that we will cover all the rationals this way, then we will know that there are ℵ0 rationals. The arrows in figure 10.1 show you how to do just this. The arrows sequentially count the rationals (skipping over the redundancies), giving us: 130

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FIGURE 10.1. This array shows the beginning of the entire set of rational numbers.

The arrows show how to move through the array in order to pair each rational number with exactly one counting number and vice versa, thus counting each rational number, and hence showing that there are exactly as many rational numbers as counting numbers. Repeats are excluded, however, so once, say, 2/3 has been counted, 4/6 is excluded.

1 0

2 1

3 1/2

4 -1

5 2

6 -1/2

7 1/3

8 ... 1/4 . . .

The ℵ0 counting numbers are the top row, and the rationals make up the bottom row. As can be seen by how the arrows in figure 10.1 progress (to infinity), each rational number will be accounted for: each rational will be counted; none will be missed. Hence, there are ℵ0 rationals. So we have now established that even though, intuitively, there seem to be fewer evens than counting numbers (because a part is less than a whole), there are in fact exactly as many evens as counting numbers, namely, ℵ0 (same with the odds). And we’ve established that adding all the negative numbers and all the fractions to the counting 131

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numbers also leaves us with exactly the same quantity of numbers, namely, ℵ0. So, though intuitively adding the infinity of fractions and the infinity of the negatives to the infinity of counting numbers would make a set with more numbers (because adding always makes more), doing so here changes nothing. There are exactly as many rational numbers as there are counting numbers. Or as the mathematicians say, the cardinalities of the counting numbers and the rationals are equal, namely, ℵ0. “OK, infinity is more than a bit strange . . .” We’re not done yet: We still don’t have all the numbers we use routinely. We are missing the irrationals. When represented in their decimal form, all rational numbers either terminate in a finite string of numbers or fall into a repeating pattern. For example, 1/2 is .5, 1/3 is .33333. . . . . Irrationals are not like this. They are numbers whose decimal representation never terminates and never repeats. Numbers like π and 3√7 are good examples. The number π is famous because you need it to calculate the area or circumference of a circle (it is also one of the most important numbers in all of science). π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (but π is not a rational number because it is not a ratio of two integers). Ok, once you add all the irrationals to the rationals, you get a set called the real numbers. And guess what? You no longer have only ℵ0 numbers. Here’s the proof.

Proof That the Cardinality of the Real Numbers Exceeds ℵ0

This proof was also first developed by Georg Cantor in 1891. The version presented here is derived from both Wallace’s and Dunham’s books. The proof is called Cantor’s Diagonal Proof, for reasons that we will see. It is a proof by contradiction. This means that we will assume that all the real numbers (aka the reals) can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the counting numbers, just like the rationals. This is equivalent to assuming that the cardinality of the set of reals is ℵ0. Then we will produce a new number outside of this correspondence, thereby showing that our initial assumption about the size of the reals was false: the cardinality of the reals must be greater than ℵ0.

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First, assume that the reals can be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with the counting numbers, as exhibited in table 1. table 1

Counting Number

Real Numbers

1 2 3 4 5 . . . n . . .

.691400000 . . . –1.956038474747 . . . .500000000 . . . .178968382 . . . –3.6519485 . . . . . . x1.a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 . . . . . .

This table shows the counting numbers paired with fractions, negative numbers, irrationals, and rationals. If this correspondence worked, then every single real number (every single rational and irrational number) on the right would be paired with a counting number on the left, and vice versa. However, we can construct a new number, b, that is different from every number in table 1, and, hence, that is not in the table. First, we are going to ignore all the digits to the left of the decimal point. If we can construct a number that differs from every number in table 1 in just the digits to the right of the decimal point, then we have shown that b is not in table 1, which is what we really want to do. So, assume that b = .b1 b2 b3 b4 b5. . . . We build b as follows: For b1, if the first postdecimal digit of the number paired with 1 is not 5, then pick 5; if the first postdecimal digit of the number paired with 1 is 5, then pick 4;

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For b2, if the second postdecimal digit of the number paired with 2 is not 5, then pick 5; otherwise, pick 4; For b3, if the third postdecimal digit of the number paired with 3 is not 5, then pick 5; otherwise, pick 4; . . . and so on . . . In general, for bn, if the nth postdecimal digit of the real number paired with counting number n is not 5, pick 5; otherwise, pick 4.

What we’re doing is moving down the diagonal of the list of real numbers in table 1, picking 5 for each bi each time the number on the diagonal is not 5, and picking 4 if the number is 5. Look at table 2, which is just table 1 with some highlights, and notice the underlined digits. table 2

Counting Number

Real Numbers

1 2 3 4 5 . . . n . . .

.691400000 . . . –1.956038474747 . . . .50 0000000 . . . .178968382 . . . –3.6519485 . . . . . . x1.a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 . . . . . .

Our new number, b, is .54555. . . . As can be seen by inspection, b is not in table 1 (again, we are ignoring what comes before the decimal point, if anything does). The number b is not the first real number 134

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(the one paired with 1) because b differs from that number in its first postdecimal position. b is not the second real number (the one paired with 2) because b differs from that number in its second postdecimal position. b is not the third real number (the one paired with 3) because b differs from that number in its third postdecimal position. . . . and so on . . . In general, b differs from every real number, R, in R’s nth position, where R is paired with the nth counting number. By following this construction procedure, our new number, b, is guaranteed to differ from every number in table 2 in at least the position shown by the underlined digit. This, in turn, means that b is not in table 2 (remember, table 2 is just table 1 with certain digits highlighted). But our initial assumption was that the reals could be paired with the counting numbers, and so b should be in the table. But it’s not. Note that adding b to table 2 (suppose we pair it with number 1 and move all the others down one) will not help, for we can just repeat our recipe for constructing yet another new b. So, the assumption that the reals are pairable with the counting numbers must be false. Hence, the cardinality of the reals is greater than ℵ0—there are more reals than there are counting numbers and hence more reals than there are rational numbers. This completes Cantor’s Diagonal Proof. Well, if we don’t have ℵ0 numbers, then how many do we have? An infinity, of course. Only now, we have an infinity that is “bigger” than ℵ0. Mathematicians call this infinity ℵ1, and ℵ1 is strictly bigger than ℵ0.7 So, there are ℵ1 rationals and irrationals together (that is, there are ℵ1 real numbers). Since there are only ℵ0 rationals, there must be ℵ1 irrationals. So the irrationals, while infinite (∞), are vastly more infinite than the rationals, which are themselves infinite. Infinity, it appears, comes in sizes. Now, let’s consider ℵ0 and ℵ1. Are these the only two infinities? Take a wild guess. There are an infinite number of infinities. This deep and puzzling idea was also discovered by Cantor in the late 1800s. All of these infinities exist in what is called the transfinite realm: ℵ0 ℵ1 ℵ2 ℵ3 ℵ4 ℵ5 ℵ6 ℵ7 ℵ8 ℵ9. . . . Consider ℵ9. It counts an infinity that is much much larger (if we can use “larger” here) than ℵ0. How can this be? And there are an infinite number of transfinite infinities far beyond mere ℵ9. There’s more. I listed the first ten transfinite cardinals as if they could be paired off with the counting numbers. So, it might appear that there are only ℵ0 transfinite numbers (also called transfinite cardinals), 135

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that is, one might think that the cardinality of the counting numbers and the cardinality of the transfinite cardinals are the same. But this is an illusion of listing the first of the transfinite cardinals. There are so many transfinite cardinals that mathematicians say that they cannot even be put into a set, no matter how large the set, and sets can be very very large. There are so many transfinite cardinals that there is no cardinal number to count them. Yet there are an infinite number of them. We are left with the notion that some infinities are bigger than others, bigger by sizes that are just barely conceivable. So infinity is not simple. It upsets matters considerably.8

The Rarity of the Commonplace

How rare are you? How rare are the things you know and love best? . . . A moment’s reflection will reveal that you are not just rare, but unique. Your particular combination of everything from your genes and gene errors to your experiences is not duplicated anywhere in the universe. In fact, they are not now duplicatable, since much of what you experienced is gone for good. But abstract away from your details. How rare is what you are made up of—matter and energy? They seem to be the most common thing there is. Rare things are interesting, in part simply because they are rare— seldom seen. A royal flush in poker is a winning hand because it is so rare. A dust devil blowing across the Martian landscape is rare (one was photographed by the Phoenix Lander during the early Martian Fall of 2008). But when something that is utterly common is shown to be actually profoundly rare, that is somewhat strange. That’s what we’ll do here: the common will be shown to be rare. This sort of rarity seems to violate the very definitions of “rare” and “common.” So, the kind of rarity we are interested in here is not just the rarity of the seldom seen. Rather, the rarity we will examine violates intuitive, fundamental principles governing the very notion of rarity. The rational numbers we discussed above are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Let’s look at this (the discussion to follow can be seen as a consequence of the fact that ℵ0 is smaller than ℵ1). The rationals, as we know, are infinite in number; there are ℵ0 of them. But unlike the counting numbers, between any two rational numbers, 136

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there is a third (simply subtract the smaller of the two numbers from the larger, divide by 2, and add that quotient to the smaller of the two rationals). The counting numbers lack this property. There is no counting number between 2 and 3. But there are rational numbers between the rationals 2 and 3: 2 1/2 for example. In fact, between any two rational numbers, no matter how close together, there is an infinite number of other rational numbers. This property of the rationals is called density: the rationals, but not the counting numbers, are dense. Which infinity counts the cardinality of the rationals between any two other rationals, you now ask? Good question. Answer: ℵ0. So between 1 and 2, or between 2 and 4, or between 2 and 70 quadrillion, there are exactly ℵ0 rational numbers. And there is a total of ℵ0 rationals altogether. The notion of density makes the fact that there are exactly as many rationals as counting numbers even more startling. Yet we know that there are far more irrationals than rationals. In fact, there are so many irrationals that ℵ1 of them cannot even be given names of any sort (and I didn’t just name them by using the phrase “cannot even be given names of any sort” because that names the collection of them, not any particular one). Now consider what is called the Real Line, the familiar line from high school math classes. This line is made up entirely of the rationals together with the irrationals. Any number from this line is called a real number. So a real number is either a rational or an irrational. There are infinitely many rationals and they are infinitely dense, so how much of the Real Line would you expect them to take up? How much space on the Real Line do the rationals occupy? . . . An infinitesimally small amount—basically none. Imagine that you have the Real Line in front of you. Not a line drawn on a chalk board or on the sidewalk or on a computer screen, but the Real Line—the actual thing itself. And imagine that you have a dart whose point is sharper than infinitesimally sharp—it can hit exactly one point on the line (physically impossible, but conceptually okay). You throw the dart at the line (suppose you are an expert marksman with darts). Mathematicians have proved that the probability of you hitting a rational number with your very special dart is . . . 0 percent. Essentially, the Real Line contains no rational numbers at all. They are so rare as to be vanishingly nonexistent. The Real Line is really made up of irrational numbers. But further, and continuing 137

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with the strangeness, the Real Line is in fact mostly made up of exotic irrationals like π, not “garden-variety” irrationals like √2 or 3√7. Mathematicians call exotic irrationals like π the transcendentals. Yet, the numbers you know best are the rational numbers.The numbers that we encounter most of the time, by far, are the rational numbers, the very numbers that basically don’t exist. Searching randomly in the vastness of all the numbers, rational and irrational alike, you will likely never find a single rational number. They are rarer than perfect diamonds, than Albert Einsteins, than Mozarts, than lightning striking the same place over and over, every second for a thousand years . . . but they are not as rare as you. Let’s abstract away from your particular details. Let’s just consider the stuff you are made of—your mass (matter) and energy. At one time in the not too distant past, it was thought that everything in the universe was made of mass or energy (they are interchangeable, via Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc 2, which says that the energy, E, of a mass, m, is that mass times the speed of light, c, squared). But no more. Now cosmologists hypothesize that the universe contains, beside mass and energy, dark matter and dark energy. Cosmologists explain that these terms don’t mean that the matter and energy are evil or somehow foreboding. Rather, the word “dark” in the case of dark matter means that such “matter” doesn’t emit radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is very unusual, and in the case of dark energy, the term “dark” is used to flag the fact that this energy works against gravity, pushing the universe apart. But also, in both cases, the term “dark” is used to mean “unknown.” “Dark” functions here in the same way the word “incognita” worked when cartographers of old labeled some geographical area “terra incognita.” (Still, if the cosmologists had really wanted to, they could have called dark matter “nonradiating matter” or “unknown matter” and dark energy “negative pressure energy” or “unknown energy.” But they didn’t. Makes you wonder why; makes you wonder if there’s something they know but won’t, or can’t, tell us.) Though we don’t know what it is, dark matter is thought to exist because our Milky Way galaxy, for example, is rotating so fast that it would fly apart unless there were a lot of extra matter within it holding it together. We just can’t see, or seem to find, this extra matter. We infer the existence of dark matter solely from its alleged gravitational effects. Dark matter is now speculated to make up somewhere between 22 and 138

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30 percent of the mass of the universe. Dark energy (which was only discovered in the very late twentieth century) is thought to make up about 66 to 74 percent of the universe. And the remaining 4 percent of the stuff of the universe? That stuff is ordinary matter and ordinary energy. So, all the stuff you know and love (and hate and are indifferent to) and all the energy that makes it possible—the pies, cakes, your favorite humans, family members, the stars at night, light, the sun, Earth, roller derby, roller coasters, mountain climbing, sex, work, housecleaning— makes up about 4 percent of the universe. This means that we only understand about 4 percent of the universe. Our physics explains that 4 percent, but unfortunately says little about the remaining 96 percent. So, not only are you unique, but the general stuff of which you are made, and that powers you, your muscles, and your cells, is rare indeed in this vast universe of darkness. The rest of the universe is made up of . . . well, God knows what, . . . perhaps not even he/she/it knows. . . . This would explain a lot, especially if the cosmologists know something we don’t, and if, though sworn to secrecy, the most decent among them tried to warn us, with the only clue they could let slip out . . . about something very very dark. So, cosmology, the study of the very large (from suns to galaxies to galactic clusters to superclusters and beyond), introduces rather strange physics. The other end of physics, the very small, also has its share of strangenesses and mysteries. I speak of course of quantum mechanics. The issue of what’s rare and what’s common takes a bizarre twist here. (I will skip all of the standard quantum mechanical weirdnesses such as matter being both particles and waves at the same time and quantum-induced shadow universes because they are well discussed in many other places.)9 One of the most common things in the universe is causation. I mean ordinary, everyday causation. Jones throws the bowling ball at the bowling pins, hits them, and the pins fall over. Smith sticks her car key in the ignition, turns it, and the car starts. Bartleby has a cold, he coughs on you, and you catch his cold. John’s lung cancer killed him. The sun comes up and warms the farmland and its crops, then the rains come, and the crops get bigger. Jiang Lee and Sharise have sexual intercourse, and Sharise gets pregnant. And on and on and on. Causation is what makes us victors and victims in this world. We make stuff happen. And other things make stuff happen to us. Causation is so common that we 139

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almost never think about it.We usually only think about it when something goes wrong. The bowling pins didn’t fall over. The car won’t start. Sharise doesn’t seem to be able to get pregnant. John never smoked. What would cause someone to spend months and months learning to fly a plane only to hijack one and fly it into a large building? What could cause them to think that was a good idea? And so on. . . . Causation is what makes it possible to be in this universe, and what makes it possible for there to be a universe to be in. The quantum world, however, is completely bereft of causation. The very essence of quantum mechanics is pure probability. In the quantum world everything happens with some probability and that is all there is to say about it. Nothing causes anything at all. Stuff just happens. Sometimes the stuff that happens (an electron going a certain direction) is very probable, and sometimes it is very improbable (an electron passing through a certain barrier). But none of it is caused. So what seems to be the most common thing in the universe, the thing that makes it intelligible to us (namely, causation), simply disappears at the fundamental levels of the physical universe. In essence, causation emerges from the realm of the noncausal. Physicists have partial explanations of some of the physical aspects of this emergence (why bowling pins fall over when hit by bowling balls), but their explanations can’t be extended to explain why a hurricane causes the US economy to stagger. Economists can explain why hurricanes cause the US economy to stagger, but they can’t tie their explanations to physics. In fact, there is no general theory at all of causation, physical or otherwise. We don’t know in general what causation is, or why it works the way that it does, or why it varies as much as it does. The situation is so bad that the philosophers are involved (never a good sign). David Hume (1711–1776), a Scottish philosopher, famously argued that there’s really no such thing as causation at all, at least we can’t know that there is such a thing. What we see when we see a moving bowling ball cause some bowling pins to fall over is really just that the bowling ball rolled up to the pins, the pins fell over, and the ball moved off in another direction. We see no causation at all. We just see one event after another—continuously, throughout our lives. The more one thinks about this, the more true this seems. Hume’s suggestion would certainly solve almost all of the problems of causation—by getting rid of it. But as usual with such philosophical solutions, its price is far 140

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too high: it is not even clear we could survive by thinking of our lives as an unconnected series of probabilistic events. More importantly, it is not clear that Hume’s view is true in the ordinary world. Matters get stranger. Everything is made up of quanta, not only matter, but energy, too. Light is made up of quanta, as are you. So at root, we are just swarms of probabilities that all have properties like spin and charge and “color” (a property of quarks).10 So, which is it, causation or probabilities? The answer is that it depends on which level you are at. This isn’t much of an explanation, though, since we don’t know why there are the levels that there are or even why there are levels at all. The levels I speak of are well known, but their emergence is mysterious.Why is there such a thing as chemistry (chemical processes), which sits on top of particle physics? Why is there such a thing as biology (life), which sits on top of chemistry? Why is there such a thing as psychology, which sits on top of biology? These are just four of the larger strata, each with its own kind of causation. There are many more levels, and each breaks into more detailed substrata. Scientists cannot answer the level questions, except in piecemeal, here and there. Rather, these are profoundly deep philosophical questions. And I think we all know what that means. So what’s rare and what isn’t is not simple, and certainly not obvious. But it is quite puzzling.

B U T I T I S N ’ T O N LY R A R E T H I N G S that are mysterious, that invoke wonder. The furniture of the everyday can also invoke wonder and a sense of mystery, though this sort of mystery, being common, is harder to experience. This is because most of the stuff in our lives belongs to a category that we deem common and, more importantly, understood. But the category something belongs to—wife, husband, child, dog, table, fork, spoon, book, father-in-law, headache—is really just a thin veneer masking that thing’s inherent, intrinsic weirdness. Think of this book. But don’t think of it as a book, or even as an object; rather, think of it, as the philosophers say, as what it is in itself. Think of this book not in relation to you or to anyone or anything else, but solely in terms of it, itself. Or think of it, as the practitioners of Zen say, as what it was before it was a book. Seeing the strange in the ordinary takes some practice, and perhaps not surprisingly, there are meditative techniques that exercise this

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capacity of ours. But it is not just the book that is ultimately mysterious. The book becomes mysterious when the user of the book is removed (which, interestingly, can only be done by the user him- or herself).Yet, an even deeper mystery obtains when the user is left in. Look at this book, or this page, or read these sentences. A visual process is occurring, involving light, along with a large number of other things, which ends with you being conscious of seeing this book, this page, of the meanings of these sentences. The book (or whatever your object of consciousness is) begins, or lies at one end of, this process of consciously seeing the book. The other end is you, the perceiver of the book and the one who is conscious of the book. This other end, this conscious self that is you, is one of the biggest mysteries in all of science, as we’ve seen. In fact, as we saw above, your conscious self is—if anything is—the central mystery of the cosmos.

three things that are mysterious indeed: consciousness, infinity, and rareness and abundance. There are many many more (see the appendix to this chapter). All of these point to the same thing: you and I and the universe we live in are quite strange. And even though we live in the twenty-first century, a century steeped in exciting and startlingly successful science, a century in which, daily, mysteries are transformed into common knowledge, we see that some mysteries, deeper than science, persist. Science doesn’t remove mysteries from our lives, it unearths them. And the ones it finds speak to us, saying: There is more to everything than meets the eye. WE HAVE NOW EXAMINED

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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 10

A Compendium of Mysteries

H E R E A R E S O M E M Y S T E R I O U S and strange things, as well as pointers to further reading. 1. Mathematics is crawling with strange things. How many people do we need to gather together in a room to be 100 percent sure that two of them will have the same birthday? 366. Right . . . ok, good. How many people do we need to gather together in a room to have a 50 percent chance that two of them will have the same birthday? That’s right, 23. . . . ! . . . Not 183, which is one-half of 366. It is somewhat hard to find books explicitly on mathematical weirdnesses because mathematicians live and work in an ethos of toughminded, no-nonsense theorem-proving. But one good book is Havi, Nonplussed. I also recommend Kaplan and Kaplan, Art of the Infinite. 2. Almost everything about quantum mechanics shocks the sensibilities and leaves one baffled. A good book for laypeople is Al Khalili, Quantum. Another good book is Smolin, Trouble with Physics. Smolin’s book comes at the universe’s strangenesses from another direction. His book is an attack on string theory (strings are suppose to be the fundamental stuff of which the matter in the universe is made). He claims it is bankrupt as a physical theory. String theory itself is crawling with weird conclusions and predictions, but in a way, its conclusions and predictions aren’t weird enough. Smolin’s point is that physicists settled too quickly for the strangenesses that they can mathematically model while ignoring the fact that their failures pointed to yet deeper mysteries.

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Smolin suggests that we have to face up to the fact that, as of now, we lack any fundamental theory that unifies both quantum physics and gravitational physics. Once we face this, we can set off afresh in search of a new, better theory. 3. Logic contains my favorite weirdnesses. There are a lot of logics. This is somewhat strange in itself, since logic is supposed to be foundational, especially for mathematics and computer science. If it’s foundational, why is there more than one of them? “Different subjects require different logics” is the obvious answer. So, for example, artificial intelligence uses one kind of logic and mathematics another one. The problem with this glib answer is that there are way more logics than subjects that rely on them. And most subjects, for example, set theory and artificial intelligence, can use incompatible logics as their foundation. So, again, why are there so many logics? Probably the most famous example of a profound strangeness in logic is Kurt Gödel’s proof that arithmetic contains truths that cannot be proved. (A somewhat useful if controversial place to start is Goldstein, Incompleteness. I recommend Kennedy’s article at http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel.) In 1931, Gödel proved that there are true arithmetical statements which can’t be proved within arithmetic, but one can know they are true anyway; indeed, one can prove they’re true. This might seem contradictory. What of it? The real shocker here (though this isn’t Gödel’s idea) is that there are logics that allow some contradictions to be true (the contradictions are false, of course, but they are also true). Even stranger: many of the contradiction-friendly logicians insist that true contradictions actually exist in the real world, and are prepared to name names. I refer the intrepid reader to Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought and In Contradiction, and to his excellent short story “Sylvan’s Box.” Finally, and though it is somewhat technical, my paper “The Bishop and Priest” holds the reader’s hand, guiding him or her to actually seeing a true contradiction. This paper is available on my website. By the way, Gödel was a font of exciting mysteries. He apparently derived a solution to Einstein’s relativity equations that shows that time is circular. See Yourgrau, A World Without Time. 4. The mysteries inundating philosophy cut right to its core. Indeed, philosophy itself is mysterious. Philosophy has made no progress since Aristotle, a genius who lived twenty-three hundred years ago. 144

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Every major problem Aristotle worked on is still with us to this day, although each problem has been updated and reformulated to take account of the advances in science and practical morality. Here’s an example of practical morality. We know now that owning slaves is morally wrong; this is only practical knowledge, however, because philosophers cannot agree on why owning slaves is wrong. They cannot agree if owning slaves violates the requirement to strive to produce only happy consequences, or if owning slaves violates our duties to other living beings (see chapter 7 for a discussion of these two approaches to morality). For more on philosophy’s lack of progress, see my paper, “There Is No Progress in Philosophy.” The two best books on philosophy’s inherent mysteriousness are McGinn, Problems in Philosophy, and Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Warning: McGinn looks for a mystery-dismissing solution. Another good book is Sorensen, Brief History of the Paradox. 5. Miscellaneous. Did you know that there is a very old, currently undecipherable text complete with detailed colored drawings sitting in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library? The author, purpose, and meaning of the text are unknown. Attempts to decode it or translate it defy all modern techniques used by linguists and cryptologists. It’s called the Voynich Manuscript. Most scholars believe it was written sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, but no one is sure (recent carbon-14 dating does put the date of the paper in the fifteenth century). The language the manuscript is written in, if indeed it is a language, is completely baffling. Detailed statistical analysis of the symbols making up the manuscript, however, leads most scholars to believe that it is in fact written in some language, just not one used on planet Earth by any known culture or people. This and other wonderful mysteries are detailed in Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason. Poundstone discusses scientific confirmation, meaning in language, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. All of these fall within the boundaries of philosophy. So, this book could have been placed in the philosophy section. But I’ve stuck it here because, besides the Voynich Manuscript, Poundstone looks at some weird aspects of computer science and discusses some of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. Another good general book is Brooks, 13 Things. It is an informed and enlightening discussion of such things as cold fusion (which stubbornly won’t go away), the placebo effect, and the perhaps already successful search for extraterrestrial intelligence. These three cases and 145

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nine more rest on real, public evidence that Brooks lays out clearly for the reader. I say “nine” because as of this writing, one of Brooks’s thirteen has been explained, it seems. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out which one. Lastly, I recommend Cartwright, Dappled World. Here, a distinguished philosopher of science argues that the actual world is a lot messier than the world of scientific laws and scientific theories. This is a good book for explaining how science really works.

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ELEVEN

The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand

R E L I G I O N S A R E C O M P L E T E LY N A T U R A L I L L U S I O N S . All their alleged depth and mystery are chimerical. We can finally set them aside as sources of mysteries not worth taking seriously. We are now free to embrace the real mysteries, the ones worth taking seriously, the ones science reveals, the ones that have excellent beauty. However, the reader might agree that the mysteries discussed in chapter 10 are indeed strange, yet disagree that they are beautiful. So, in this chapter, I make the case that chapter 10’s mysteries and all the others like them indeed possess excellent beauty: they are beautiful, profound, and unnerving, pointing to deeper truths that we have yet to embrace. But first, we need to note something. As luck would have it, the very genetic makeup that makes us religious is also what stands in the way of seeing the beauty in the mysteries, for as we saw in chapter 5 and its appendix and in the appendix to chapter 4, one crucial aspect of religion is our psychological need for producing explanations.The walking tree from chapter 5, though strange, is meant to function, in part, as an explanation used by the “Walking Tree Clan.” How? Because of the not-so-simple reason that we humans, often by default, take intelligent agents, agents similar to us, to be the ultimate ground of explanation (this was a key point in chapter 4’s appendix). Given some phenomenon X, pointing out that X occurs because some intelligent agent wants it to occur or is responsible for doing it often fully explains X to

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us. Our gods and goddesses are there to make our world less scary by supplying us with agent-based explanations. This is why, as discussed in chapter 5, we are so good—too good, in fact—at recognizing agents in the world around us. The long and slow march of human science is the march away from deploying agents—sun gods, rain gods, thunder gods, crop-growing gods, love gods, war gods, and so on—to explain things; it is the march toward unearthing mechanical processes and using them to explain things, where “mechanical” entails “mindless.” Our conclusion is that seeing the excellent beauties (the mysteries of chapter 10) as beautiful requires at least some measure of refusing to be a victim of the religion illusion, if only temporarily. I realize this could be difficult. The need for explanations runs very deep in our species (for all we know, many of our fellow species, especially our fellow big-brained mammals, also deploy explanations of some sort to help them cope with a dangerous and probabilistic world). A beloved ideal from the Age of Enlightenment (roughly, the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth) was that science and rationality would eventually explain everything.1 With enough effort, ingenuity, and insight, humans, using science, could understand everything worth understanding. This ideal is still with us to this day, both within science and within our culture.2 The war between science and religion discussed in this book is not a war between those who are enamored with the Enlightenment ideal and those who are not. It is rather a war between those who think science can explain everything and those who think science and religion together can explain everything. The fight, therefore, is over boundaries (we saw this in our discussion of Gould’s alleged nonoverlapping magisteria). Science’s proper domain consists in explanations about how cancer works, why the moon creates tides, how the sun works, and so on. But science cannot explain where the universe came from or, currently, the origin of life or humans. Some divine intervention is needed to explain those things. But if we work separately or together with religion, the message is the same: everything is explainable, everything is understandable—if not by us, exactly, then by us and some deity. Even though total understanding is an ideal, all scientists, and indeed nearly all people, love a good mystery: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I found it!] but ‘That’s funny . . .’”3 This is why, though it was a truly 148

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great machine, the Tevatron’s epitaph was so negative: it revealed no surprises. And everyone likes surprises . . . provided they don’t upset things too much. The reason scientists love surprises, the reason murder mysteries are a billion-dollar-a-year business, is that everyone loves to have a mystery to solve. Told up front that “this mystery has no solution,” most scientists, and most people, would be less than overjoyed. The Enlightenment ideal insists on solvable mysteries, mysteries that give way to understanding. The existence of the excellent beauties destroys this ideal. Some things are not understandable. And some of these things are so central to being human that it is nearly impossible to conceive of us without them—consciousness, for example. In the appendix to this chapter, I discuss just how strongly the existence of mysteries with excellent beauty clashes with the Enlightenment ideal. If I’m right about the excellent beauties, the Enlightenment ideal stands unmasked as overly optimistic; it should therefore be abandoned. I confess that the excellent beauties from chapter 10 strike me as obviously beautiful: once seen, they and their stark beauty are almost overwhelming. But the reader perhaps needs convincing. Of course, judgments of what is beautiful vary considerably from person to person, so arguments for this or that aesthetic are notoriously unconvincing. This is all the more true when it comes to arguments for an enduring mystery aesthetic. Still, something positive can be said. First, even someone who denies that the mysteries are genuinely and permanently mysterious can come to see that the problems or insights they present are profound. And profundities are intrinsically beautiful. The great mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) once said of the perplexing infinity of infinities revealed by Georg Cantor’s work (see chapter 10), “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.” All paradises are beautiful, by definition.Viewed this way, the mysteries can be seen to be more than problems to be solved. They add an aesthetic dimension to our lives. Second, the strange behavior of infinity, the intractable existence of consciousness, and the rarity of the commonplace challenge the idea that the universe in which we live is a place for humans.This is the heart of the clash between the excellent beauties and the Enlightenment ideal: the mysteries of chapter 10 reveal a world that is not mundane. The mysteries show us that this seemingly ordinary universe is not ordinary 149

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at all. It is richer, deeper, more magnificent than it appears in the standard coming and going of our daily lives. And this richness expresses possibility, open-endedness, opportunity. And, simply put, all this is beautiful. This point goes deeper. There is a sort of paradox here, for the universe is very much a place for humans since we evolved here. In human life, if something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y. The even numbers clearly fit inside the set of all the counting numbers. Ergo, the set of even numbers must be smaller than the set of counting numbers. But this is not true: there are, as we have seen, exactly as many even numbers as counting numbers, namely, there are ℵ0 of both. So to some extent, the excellent beauties exist because of the kinds of beings we are. We are Earthlings, emerging on the scene just a tad under 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang. We are large mammals, with five senses, big brains, and opposable thumbs. We are not made of dark matter (as far as we know); it is therefore strange to us. We live in the subinfinite realm, not the transfinite realm, so the behavior of infinity is strange to us. Most of the numbers we use are garden-variety rational numbers. So it is strange to us that the rationals take up basically no space at all on the number line, which turns out to be composed primarily of the exotic transcendentals like π. The excellent beauties again reveal our Janus-faced nature. We find the behavior of infinity puzzling, but we unearthed the behavior of infinity. We built our modern world primarily using rational numbers, yet we can prove the existence of the transcendentals. We are not made of dark matter, yet we have solid cosmological evidence that it must exist. We can, therefore, see more than we can understand. And the universe stands revealed as a place that shows us more than we can understand. It is paradoxical to be human. And the excellent beauties show us this. And, I submit, this fact about us is deep and profound, and while perhaps unnerving, it is beautiful. But won’t science (again, broadly construed) one day solve every question we have? No, it won’t. This is precisely what our mysteries point toward: the world is full of surprises, or, better, our relationship with the world is full of surprises. Our knowledge of the universe and our place in it is robust and complex. But even with our knowledge, the world keeps surprising us not only with new surprises like dark energy, but with continuing surprises that result from crucial phenomena refusing to succumb to explanation—consciousness, for example, 150

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which decade after decade remains completely unexplained and seemingly beyond the reach of any theory. Consciousness’s intractability becomes more perplexing, not less, as the centuries roll by. Again, I claim that these surprises are beautiful. The open-endedness of our relationship with our universe appears to be permanent. Even if, one day, consciousness were to be reductively explained via the discovery of some sort of very subtle neural process, the science required to do that is so unimaginable, currently, that this science itself would open up whole new ways to think about ourselves, our minds, and the universe. Those new ways of thinking would introduce further, deeper problems that would be new mysteries, pointing still further into the universe’s profound richness and unexpected open-endedness. So the mysteries are, or can be thought of as, beautiful, and that beauty is permanent, even if some of the mysteries themselves are not. What of the nonmundane world behind the mundane one? What of the magnificent richness and depth revealed by the mysteries? What of the possibilities and open-endedness of the universe? How should we approach all of this? Perhaps it wouldn’t be out of place to approach it with a kind of reverence. Those willing to acknowledge the mysteries as genuine mysteries and to see their beauty are probably willing to go a little further and allow themselves to feel reverence toward the mysteries, or if not that, then reverence toward what the mysteries reveal: a strange universe of which we are intimately a part.

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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 11

Welcome to the Inscrutable

T H E E N L I G H T E N M E N T I D E A L I S A T W O R K , full force, in David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World.1 Indeed, this book is an exemplar of the Enlightenment ideal. Here I briefly discuss how his conclusions are incompatible with the existence of the excellent beauties. Chalmers’s central tool is the notion of scrutability, which is just comprehensibility. (Scrutability is introduced as a technical term so Chalmers can use it as he needs without importing a lot of implicit definitions and extra notions.) If we leave out the technical philosophy, Chalmers’s claim is this: there is a compact class of truths such that knowing those truths suffices to know all other truths about our universe.2 Chalmers calls this a scrutability thesis. Chalmers is asserting that knowledge of some relatively small set of basic truths about our universe (the compact class of truths) can serve as a basis for knowledge of all other truths about the universe. He says: “To a first approximation, these [scrutability] theses suggest that knowledge of the base truths about the world might serve as a basis for knowledge of all truths about the world” (p. 7). We know from chapter 10 that there are excellent beauties, truths that we know but that we don’t really comprehend. Quantum mechanics is crawling with such truths, and, as discussed in the text, infinity defies our ordinary notion of “is contained in.” (If something X fits inside of something else,Y, then X is smaller than Y. The even numbers

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clearly fit inside the set of all the counting numbers. Ergo, the set of even numbers must be smaller than the set of counting numbers. But it is not.) This is a good place to introduce our own technical term: Grok (from Robert Heinlein’s famous novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961). To grok something is to understand it thoroughly, intuitively, even empathically (that is, by empathy). More metaphorically, “grok” means to be one with or one with the observed. (In the novel, “grok” has a literal meaning, too: “to drink.”)3 We grok a lot of things. We grok the notion “contained in”: “If something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y.” We grok both the notion of consciousness and the notion of being physical.Yet we do not grok how the even numbers are strictly a subset of the counting numbers while both sets are the exact same size. In general, we do not grok infinity. We do not grok how a physical being such as an Earthling could be conscious, which we clearly are. Nor, if we go the other way, do we grok how consciousness could be physical. (In the case of consciousness, it is fair to say that we don’t even comprehend in an ordinary sense how consciousness could be physical.) We understand quantum mechanics to a very robust extent, but we don’t grok it. My point here is that in its ordinary sense, we might understand the excellent beauties, but we don’t grok them. What then of Chalmers’s scrutability thesis? Chalmers has not distinguished between understanding something and grokking it. The claim I’m making here is that this distinction is crucial to seeing the reality of how humans are embedded in, exist in, this universe. This distinction is crucial to understanding what humans are and the universe we are in: we grok some things, but not other things. We might phrase the problem I am raising this way: the universe is perhaps scrutable, but it is not grokkable. The parts that are not grokkable contain the excellent beauties, the mysteries that possess excellent beauty, to put it slightly more formally. Yes, we understand things, complex and difficult things. But there are many things we don’t thoroughly, intuitively, and empathically understand. There are many things we cannot be one with. All of these are ungrokkable things. And some of these ungrokkables are beautiful both intrinsically and simply because they are ungrokkable.

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And what of the Enlightenment ideal? It fails, too, to distinguish between comprehending via science and rationality and grokking via science and rationality. We already know that the Enlightenment ideal is only partially true for ordinary, mundane comprehending. We now also know that it is certainly not true of grokking.4

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T W E LV E

The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God

S O W H A T ? T H E R E A R E T H I N G S that are genuinely and objectively mysterious and that are beautiful. . . . So what? Of what possible use could such mysteries be to Homo religiosus? The mysteries of chapter 10 are not beings. The mysteries cannot proscribe certain behaviors; they cannot be the author of and enforce morality; they cannot comfort the suffering, provide succor for the afflicted, protect the innocent; they cannot be worshiped, they cannot inspire worship; they cannot create ex nihilo; they cannot love or be loved. Perhaps chapter 10 was interesting; perhaps even enlightening, but what deep meaning could the realm of the mysterious have for us? But the so what? sword is double-edged and cuts both ways. As we saw in chapter 7, no god needs to proscribe any behaviors. Morality arises naturally, and requires only that we be rational and have feelings of empathy for others. Furthermore, human morality is deeper and more right than much religious morality. The September 11 attacks were immoral, yet encouraged by a branch of Islam; the Crusades were immoral, yet instigated by the Catholic Church; and on and on. Hence, even if some deity proscribed certain behaviors, so what? It doesn’t matter what behaviors a god proscribes, we know right from wrong independently of any god. When, in the Bible, Yahweh says we should kill homosexuals, we know that he is wrong (even most members of the religious right in the United States refrain from killing or even advocating killing homosexuals). When Yahweh killed all the firstborn

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in Egypt, we know that was wrong: he shouldn’t have done that. And he shouldn’t have turned Job over to Satan on a bet—that was wrong of him. We turn to our gods when we are suffering or afflicted, but so what?—to what avail? No god comforts us or provides succor for our afflictions: the innocent still die horribly (of course, for many the concept of a god is comforting). Just recall the events of September 11, 2001. Many innocent people died that day, receiving no help at all. Right now, somewhere, an innocent child is being raped, and is receiving no help at all. At the end of the day, we either suffer on our own or receive help and solace from another human . . . It was the New York City firefighters, police, emergency personnel, and fellow New Yorkers who came to the rescue on September 11. Suppose some god created the universe ex nihilo. Without a continuing moral presence, which is obviously lacking, so what? True, gods inspire worship and are worshiped; they are also loved. Suppose one of them loved us back. Without genuine loving consequences arising from that love, so what? Unless the relevant deity cures one’s terminally ill child, of what use is its love? Humans love, and in their loving, they sacrifice deeply and daily for real . . . and often permanently. According to most Christians, Jesus loves us and sacrificed for all of us. But he did this once, a long time ago, and for something of dubious merit: to save us from our “sins.” I know many people (adults, not just children), and so do you, who have never sinned in their lives. It’s hard to believe that any deity worth worshiping would allow those peccadilloes from which we all suffer to keep us out of heaven. And those who really do sin, the evil among us, continue to flourish. Jesus’s sacrifice, it could be reasonably be said, was meaningless. Moreover, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice: he didn’t permanently die, and he knew he wouldn’t (he knew he was the son of the god Jehovah), so his sacrifice was temporary. Compare this to the profound sacrifice of a random mortally wounded infantryman in any war in the history of the human race. That person died permanently for some ideal which he probably loved, or at least respected (of course many believe that their honored dead go somewhere special, like Valhalla, or Summerland, or one of the heavens, but they are still permanently dead to us here on Earth; they don’t get to come back and talk to us as Jesus did). Or pick any single

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mother who is struggling to raise her children. Or a doctor working with the sick and impoverished. Or a community organizer who is living in poverty because community organizing doesn’t pay well. One can think of many many others who intentionally sacrifice for their loved ones every day.These are cases of real love, meaningful love—caring that matters. If the deity that loves can’t even do what the weakest among us can do with his or her love, of what use is that deity’s love and that deity? The bottom line is this: all the gods in all the religions on planet Earth, even if they do some work from time to time, cannot be counted on when the chips are down. If you need real help right now, you need a human. Prayer, magic, ritual, invocation, spell casting, and divination all work with about the same reliability as flipping coins. That should force us to ask something. And what it should force us to ask is the big embarrassing question so what? All of these cases of so what? are every bit as biting as those raised against the mysteries. Even if there exists just one of the millions of gods that populate human religions, so what? From chapter 5, we learned that religion arose naturally. It is a mechanism for our evolutionary flourishing. The real work of religion is knitting human groups together and possibly providing some individual psychological benefits, for example, when a loved one dies. So pretty obviously, we can all be completely unimpressed by the alleged work of religion: comforting the suffering, proscribing behavior, creating, and so forth. Try this: consider a major religion other than yours (assuming you have one; if you don’t, this exercise will be easy). Aren’t you in fact unimpressed by what the gods in that other religion do? If you are suffering, wouldn’t the so-called comfort of that other religion leave you cold? And you probably don’t feel constrained at all to avoid the behaviors proscribed by that religion. But, as we now know from chapter 5, religion won’t go away for biological reasons. It has lost the war but it won’t fall down—because it is written into the human genome. So we have the battle of the so what?, the battle between the so what? raised against our mysteries from chapter 10 and the so what? raised against religion. . . . Yet another religious battle to go with the one between religion and science and the one between religion and universal human decency and respect. But,

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the so what? raised against the mysteries can be answered. This is what this chapter is about. To get to this answer, we must first address several matters. To begin, we delve more deeply into the so what? raised against religion. The issue here is one rarely appreciated. The issue is not atheism versus theism. That’s a tired debate, as we noted in chapter 8. The issue is, rather, one of the uselessness of our gods. Even if some or all of them exist, it is impossible to deny that their concern for humans is thin. What we do with this fact is important. For the second matter, we will make sure that our mysteries from chapter 10 could not be used to found a new religion. This is required because the goal here is begin to refocus our religious impulses toward (or even perhaps transform them into) something else, something that doesn’t exult in invidious distinctions, something less destructive. At least, we want to explore this possibility. There’s one more matter to take care of before answering the so what? raised against the excellent beauties. We must contrast our chapter 10 mysteries with religious mysteries. We will examine mysteries from several religions and compare them to ours. This will exhibit the profound differences between the two kinds. What is left will not be a religion at all, but it may perhaps speak to human spiritual longing in a way that is genuinely fulfilling. We cannot rid ourselves of religion; it is in our genes, our human blueprint. But perhaps we can direct some of our religious attitudes and sentiments toward something real, something that might produce a kind transcendence that is free and available to all: the mysteries. Doing this will answer the so what? raised against them.

directed at humankind’s religions point to something quite deep: Knowledge, explicitly graspable, that, in its explicitness, frees all of humanity from the bondage of our dangerous collective evolutionary illusion. Let’s consider this in detail. The knowledge is this: the responsibility for human flourishing is ours and ours alone. We humans have to do the hard work on our own. All of it. Every bit of it. Nothing, no one, no supernatural being is going to save us. Beliefs to the contrary are extremely dangerous. A Mormon missionary once told me that we didn’t have to worry at all about the T H E M A N Y C A S E S O F S O W H AT ?

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environmental damage we are causing because Jesus was coming back soon and so we weren’t going to be around long enough to have to deal with problems such as global pollution and global warming.1 Many of the rest of us want to, and see that we have to, fix the environmental problems that we are all facing. But we’re the ones who have to do that work. We have find solutions to problems like global warming, we have to cope with the rising sea levels, with decreasing crop yields, with water shortages, we have to try to live without re-creating the problem, assuming we can solve it. No religion told us that racism is bad. No religion told us that women should be full citizens in the world. Just the opposite, in fact: religions instigated, and continue to support, both racism and sexism. For example, until 1978, the Mormon church excluded black men from their priesthood; they still exclude women to this day, as do many of the other major religions—will there ever be a female pope? (Pope Joan is a myth.) Whether there will ever be a black pope is anyone’s guess. On our own, as members of the smartest species in the known universe, we had to figure out that racism was wrong, we had to figure out that sexism was wrong. No deity told us. And then we had to figure out how to try to hold racism and sexism at bay, how to try to get rid of them, how to ameliorate their effects. We have been, at best, only mildly successful. During the 2008 US election, a gentleman in a feed store told me (and here I quote): “I’m not voting for any damn nigger who wants to take my guns away.” Any future success on these hideous problems is on our shoulders and ours alone. Future failures to fix racism and sexism will be our fault and our fault alone. We are the ones who will have to figure out how to cure cancer and AIDS, how to handle the various new and deadly flus, and how to deal with yet newer diseases that will come. We have to. The Oracle at Delphi is useless for curing cancer; so is the Catholic shrine at Lourdes. We are the ones who have to figure out what to do about crime and drug and alcohol addictions, what to do if we are in the direct path of an asteroid or comet, and how to prevent rampant species extinction, including ours. All these problems are ours alone; we have to solve them. The good news here is that we’ve been doing a passable job—if you look at the big picture . . . and if you tilt your head and squint. . . . For example, slavery is still a staggering evil. There are more people 159

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enslaved now than ever. Experts estimate that there are perhaps as many as twenty-five million enslaved humans today, mostly women and children. And slavery is still with us because it is a multibillion dollar industry. But today slavery is regarded as immoral by many people and by all people of good will. (This was not always the case: Thomas Jefferson had slaves, yet he arguably was a person of at least some good will.) Furthermore, humans who enslave other humans are breaking the law in every country in the world. Though we have a very long way to go, just this much is at least somewhat impressive. It is impressive because the major religions condoned and even encouraged slavery. Before the Common Era, Judaism embraced it, and approving discussions of slavery are still found in the Christian Bible and Torah . . . in Leviticus, of course. So, though we are religious naturally, we have successfully fought against our own inclinations and the teachings of our religions. That albeit mild victory can lift anyone’s spirits. It is much better to have cancer now than even ten years ago. And ten years hence, cancer treatments will be even better. . . . This is due to human medical researchers doing their best, not to some deity. If you get cancer, by all means pray—but go see a cancer doctor, too. And this list goes on and on.2 It is a list of humans doing their best to makes things better, to fix things, to improve things, to make good things. Some of these people are religious, some aren’t (virtually every religion is represented, so no one religion has a monopoly on actually being helpful from time to time)—but they are all human. This is the deep point here. The facts I’m pointing to are obvious. All we have to do is to complete them, to take the leap they are pointing to, which is this: we should explicitly embrace what we all already know, that the life of humankind is the sole responsibility of humankind. To paraphrase Jacob Marley (from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol): “Mankind is our business!” Religion is not about morality—we create a better morality with our rational, feeling minds. We humans comfort and aid those in need, in whatever form their need is. We humans protect the innocent as best we can. And we humans love, and our love matters. Except as a palliative, it is of no use to look to religion for help with the hard work of life. We humans will either do it or it won’t get done. So, by all means keep your gods, but also roll up your sleeves and get to work.

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We see, then, that the so what? raised against all religions is sharp indeed. Now we need to consider whether our mysteries could be the foundation of a new religion.

be the foundation of a new religion? No. Recall our definition of “religion.” A religion is a social group with social boundaries between it and the surrounding larger society and culture (even if that society and culture has to be the rest of the world, as is the case with the major religions, abstractly conceived). A religion endorses and requires supernatural events, states, and beings. And religions invoke some notion of the holy and sacred. The mysteries could be the foundation of a special social group. For example, the knowledge of the weirdnesses of infinity could be held by a select few that formed a “priesthood” of the “Infinity Mystery Club”—imagine a priesthood of mathematicians. They could then dole out the information about infinity a little at a time to those they deemed worthy. Something very similar to this actually happened in ancient Greece. A school formed by Pythagoras and his followers, called the Pythagoreans, was just such a secret mathematical priesthood. They apparently kept secret such knowledge as that the square root of 2 is an irrational number (and allegedly killed a member who leaked it to the press). And what about that cabal of dark cosmologists discussed in chapter 10? So, if it happened once, it could happen again, presumably. . . . But a priesthood of the mysteries like infinity is very unlikely because many many people across diverse cultures already know a lot about all of them—the knowledge of the mysteries is not arcane. For example, you now know about infinity’s weirdnesses along with many other mysteries. Furthermore, what we can do with these mysteries—explore their ramifications and their boundaries—enhances the democracy of knowledge, thus preventing such knowledge from being (or at least making it very difficult for it to be) incorporated into a religious power hierarchy. The knowledge of the mysteries cannot easily be used to manipulate people, so it can’t be used to give one group power over another (the Pythagoreans just had secrets, not real power, like money; and anyway, they lived long before the knowledge we are discussing here became widespread and freely available). The mysteries COULD THE MYSTERIES

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of consciousness, for example, cannot be used to define sin and condemn sinners. Without the ability to be used to manipulate people, the knowledge of the mysteries cannot give rise to priests and priestesses. There’ll be no shamans or gurus, no monks or nuns, no prophets or saints. And hence, there’ll be no martyrs. The knowledge of the mysteries, once freed, is unlikely to be reshackled.3 So the mysteries are going to be inadequate for forming a dominating in-group, which is required for religion. What about the supernatural? The really beautiful thing about the mysteries is that they are real: they are not supernatural in any way.They are freely available to everyone. No special magical talents are required to understand them; no special connection to any god is required to access them; no psychic abilities are required to communicate them. They are natural. Weird . . . unsettling, . . . but perfectly natural. It is stunning to contemplate that they really exist in our universe—that our universe really is a strange place. What about holiness or sacredness? Here matters get considerably more complicated. Perhaps the mysteries can support some notion of the sacred. But this is insufficient for forming a religion. Any sacred thing that doesn’t at the same time allow for forming a clique, that doesn’t allow for forming a special priest class, that doesn’t depend on the supernatural is going to be useless for forming a religion. We conclude that the mysteries cannot function as the foundation of a religion. Which is good. But now, let us turn to the matter of comparing our mysteries with those of religion.

M O S T H U M A N S D O N ’ T L I K E genuine, intractable mysteries. Part of the reason for this is that humans need to feel in control, individually, in their personal lives, and collectively, in their social ones. Sometimes we are in control, but often we are not, and we certainly don’t want to increase our feeling of being not in control. But matters are more complex: whether we feel in control doesn’t usually align with whether we really are in control. Here, then, is one of the roles of faith. Faith is a surrogate for control: we are not in control, we acknowledge, but we have faith that someone or something else is in control. The mysteries from chapter 10 require no faith.

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Removing mystery is one of religion’s jobs. Who created the universe? Your favorite deity.Why did Smith’s child die? It was time for her to go to heaven. True, these don’t really remove the mystery (who created your favorite deity? why was it time for her to go to heaven?), but they comfortably mask these so-called mysteries at a superficial level, reminiscent of a child’s understanding of why Brussels sprouts have to be eaten: “Because Mom says so, that’s why.” Removing mystery is also one of science’s jobs—perhaps its main job. But paradoxically, as we’ve seen, science creates mysteries: it was science, after all, that revealed the weird world of quantum mechanics and the bizarre ratios of matter and energy to dark matter and dark energy. And of course it is science’s abject failure at explaining consciousness that reveals its mysteriousness. Religions also create mysteries, of a sort. It is important now to contrast religious mysteries with the ones discussed in chapter 10. Let’s consider some examples of religious mysteries. For each of these mysteries, it is important for the reader to adopt the mindset or point of view of the relevant religion in order to understand them (note that this is not required for understanding chapter 10’s mysteries). From outside the religion, many of these mysteries aren’t mysterious at all. (The following have been graciously submitted by devout practitioners of the respective religions.) Christian: Why did God reveal so much to us through revelation, including of course sending Jesus Christ, and yet leave so much hidden? Moreover, all the revelations are very difficult to understand, so it is not clear what they are revealing. Another mystery is, why does prayer sometimes work and sometimes not? Buddhist: All of reality that we perceive is an illusion that masks the true nature of things. But if so, then why do we all have the same illusion? Usually when we all experience the same illusion, like experiencing a mirage when looking out across the desert, there are physical and optical properties that explain this. But according to Buddhism, these very physical and optical properties are themselves part of the bigger illusion in which we are trapped. So, again, why do we have the same illusion? On the other hand, often those who experience illusions experience different ones: Jones sees the ghost or UFO but you do not; this is why it is so comforting when someone else tells us that they, too, saw the weird lights in the sky (for example). Yet the illusion of reality is nearly universal and very detailed. How can this be? 163

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Wiccan: Magic is a crucial aspect of Wicca (modern witchcraft). But why does magic work only sometimes and randomly? Another central and interesting mystery surrounding Wicca (sort of a metamystery, really) is why people would self-identify with being a witch. There have always been those who have a special ability to perform magic or sorcery (or so many believe). Of those, some performed magic beneficial to their group or tribe (say, for health or protection or justice), while others performed maleficent magic, at least some of the time. These latter humans, of whatever culture and time, have traditionally been called by terms that best translate into the English word “witch.” So, why would someone willingly want to be thought of as a witch, as a bad person? Jewish: How could God ask Abraham to kill his beloved son and then offer him up as a burnt offering? And how could Abraham have obeyed? He would have killed his son had not God stopped him. (Genesis has lots of mysteries of this sort.) The Book of Job is also a source of a deep mystery, discussed in chapter 4: why would a good deity allow evil? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? The first thing to note about these mysteries is that they are all religion-dependent. That is, from outside of Wicca, say, it is not a mystery why spells don’t work on a regular basis. Indeed, from outside Wicca, the mystery is why anyone would think casting a spell should work. Since they are religion-dependent, the religious mysteries are not democratic—they are not available openly to everyone. One cannot merely do some reading or some research and come to understand the mystery in the way members of the religion do. One has to be a member of “the club” to get them. But the mysteries of science, logic, and mathematics are democratic—they are open to anyone. It doesn’t matter what religion, if any, you belong to, infinity still seems to come in sizes. Knowledge alone is required to get the scientific mysteries. There’s no club to belong to. No? What about the science club? The math club? Some scientific and mathematical mysteries are so complicated that one has to be an accomplished practitioner to get them. To truly understand the distribution of matter and energy in the universe requires years of being immersed in very complicated physics. That’s true, but not on point. The issue isn’t that to understand the scientific mysteries, one has to know some science, which is, of course, true (although, as we’ve seen here, one doesn’t have to know 164

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that much). The issue is that, outside of science, the scientific mysteries do not go away, they do not lose their mysterious edge; they remain mysterious even to nonscientists. The apparent fact that matter and energy make up only 4 percent of the total stuff of the universe can be grappled with and at least well enough understood to cause a raising of the eyebrows by anyone—accountant, welder, farmer, musician, or priest. One can know next to nothing about science and still get this fact and get some of its strange ramifications. Furthermore, outside of their respective religions, the religious mysteries not only lose their mysteriousness, they usually also morph into something else entirely that is all too easy to understand. Outside of Abrahamic religions, Abraham’s unhappy behavior toward his son is not mysterious at all, it’s crazy . . . and it’s child abuse, plain and simple. So the religious mysteries are dependent on their respective religions for their very existence as mysteries. Not so with the scientific and mathematical mysteries. Secondly, even inside the appropriate religion, the religious mysteries are not beautiful—they are troubling. The Buddhist mystery about all of us experiencing the same illusion is an impediment to being a Buddhist. It has to be answered before one can proceed with one’s Buddhist training. That prayers don’t always work has to be addressed; otherwise belief and even faith are jeopardized. Many of the religious mysteries are in fact large impediments to faith and belief. But the scientific mysteries are not impediments to science; they are no threat to science at all. This is one of the great things about science: a mystery is a spur to action and further research (research into dark matter and dark energy is one example; this is also the lesson of the mothballing of the Tevatron Collider, as we saw). Another great thing is that a mystery, even in the core of a science, doesn’t derail that science. It is true that some scientific mysteries appear to be intractable—consciousness is one such example. But though consciousness’s mysteriousness is widely, if begrudgingly, acknowledged (but, tellingly, only as a temporary mystery), this has no effect on the relevant neuroscience: neuroscientists working on consciousness can and do make some progress on understanding consciousness.4 Lastly, a mystery in one corner of science, for example, the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, doesn’t threaten the other areas of quantum mechanics, and it certainly doesn’t threaten biology. 165

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But why don’t the mysteries of quantum mechanics threaten biology? And, in general, why don’t the mysteries in one area of science (understood very broadly to include mathematics and philosophy) threaten all other areas of knowledge? This question is quite deep, and it is fundamental. It cuts to the heart of what science is and how human knowledge is structured. There is no agreed-upon answer to this question. Proof of this claim is that philosophers work on these topics . . . the two fields are Philosophy of Science, where philosophers try to figure out what science is, and Epistemology, where philosophers try to figure out if we know anything and if so, how, as well as how our human knowledge is structured. As discussed in the appendix to chapter 10, if philosophy makes little to no progress, the fact that philosophers are contemplating something is not good news for those hoping to understand that thing. We see then that it is itself a mystery why mysteries in one area of science don’t threaten other areas of science.We can take a stab at an answer, though.We know that science works. We can cure someone’s strep throat by using antibiotics such as penicillin. And furthermore, we know why antibiotics don’t work as well on such diseases as they used to: the pathogens are evolving to handle our antibiotics. Since science works, the knowledge it discovers must therefore be real (at least this is a plausible conclusion). But also the mysteries it unearths must therefore be real. This suggests that perhaps scientific knowledge is like Swiss cheese: the cheese represents what we know, and the holes represent what we don’t. Some of these holes are special. They aren’t simply things we don’t know, but are mysteries we will probably never know.The key fact, though, is that the mysteries and knowledge are real. We can sum all this up by saying: • Religious mysteries reveal problems with religions; • The scientific mysteries reveal how strange the universe really is. So the differences between the religious mysteries and the scientific ones are profound . . . as profound as one can get. We conclude that the mysteries are real, and hence independent of any doctrine or dogma; they are freely available to everyone, and they are beautiful, engendering reverence. That’s so what.

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Summa Mysteriologica

I N H I S L A S T D E C A D E , the Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) labored steadily on his Summa Theologica (Summary of Theology). He never finished it.Yet it is his most famous and important work, and it summarizes a sizable portion of Christian theology at the time. A significant part of its fame rests on its five arguments for the existence of the central Christian deity we’ll just call God.1 It has always puzzled me that one would have to argue for the existence of God (or any other deity, for that matter). A being of the magnificence of God would be obvious to the most casual observer. But of course, such a view doesn’t take into account the Fall—the original sin of Adam and Eve. Except there never was any Adam or Eve (humans evolved) and therefore there was no one to do the original sinning and hence no original sin. And anyway, it would be profoundly immoral to punish billions and billions of humans for an act done in understandable ignorance, especially since Adam and Eve were suckered by God into sinning, that is, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (read chapter 3 of Genesis, verses 2–7). No moral god would do such a thing. Hence, there was no sin, original or otherwise. So there wasn’t a Fall. So, I ask again, why would it be necessary to argue for God’s existence? However, it is easy to justify arguing for the existence and mysteriousness of our mysteries from chapter 10. Not everyone knows about them, and some of those who do (for example, mathematicians) frequently deny that the mysteries are excellent beauties.Yet, as we have

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seen, the mysteries do exist and are indeed beautiful. Given this, it is important that everyone know about them. But the mysteries seem unable to help you live your life. They won’t help you achieve your dreams or cure your illnesses, they won’t help your children and loved ones, they won’t get you a new car or a promotion, they won’t even make you aware of their existence. But we know now that it is not only permissible to ask but required of us to ask: how much do the deities hovering over and around planet Earth actually help us live our lives? The answer is: no more than Chance itself. As discussed in chapter 12, the entire burden of living a happy and good life falls squarely on our own shoulders. When it comes to living the good life, we couldn’t be more alone. The mysteries are not as powerless to help us live better lives as it might appear. Beyond the beauty and awe suggested in chapters 10 and 11, there are other reasons why everyone should know about them. As we’ve seen, the excellent beauties from chapter 10 are not a palliative for angst. Indeed, they can cause angst; I have seen them do so.We now know, for example, that they stand opposed to the Enlightenment ideal. The excellent beauties represent limits of science and rationality. Could accepting that science and, indeed, reason are sometimes powerless improve our lives? It certainly could. The excellent beauties suggest not only that some things are not understandable, but that nothing is fully understandable, if for no other reason than that full understanding requires understanding any given thing’s complex relationships to every other thing in the universe, no matter how large or small or how abstract. This suggests that we should adopt a new epistemic attitude toward what we think we know. I call this new attitude the provisional epistemic attitude. This is the attitude that any thing we know is known by us only provisionally. Certainty is provisional. The provisional epistemic attitude says that we have to live with ignorance. We have to keep going, keep making decisions, even though we know that we don’t know all that we need to know to make the decisions, or even, sometimes, any of what we need to know. We have to live in ignorance. Of course, we try to keep ignorance at bay. And it is right that we do this (probably). But we need to be humble in our judgments of our efforts.

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The provisional epistemic attitude also says that we should all explicitly learn to live with randomness, with probabilities. The universe we live in might not obey fixed laws at its deepest levels, or indeed at any of its levels—all laws might be statistical in nature, even Einstein’s laws. Our universe might not have a well-organized hierarchal structure, for example, with biology supervening on chemistry which in turn supervenes on physics. The universe might be a jumble; our world might dappled, as Cartwright argued.2 It is obvious that the universe is not chaotic, of course (obvious now, provisionally). But it is equally obvious that it is not well behaved. We must live in this in-between universe. Of course, we like it when we find laws (or what seem to be laws). And it is right that we look for them (probably). But we need to be guarded in our judgments of how strong, how universal, such laws are. Part of my claim here is that the provisional epistemic attitude should be adopted because it is true, . . . provisionally. Another good reason to adopt it is a pragmatic one: given what we know about ourselves and the world (that is, that we and it are full of surprises), the provisional epistemic attitude secures the maximum amount of stability available for us while providing the flexibility needed for the surprises. But there is even more. I think that adopting the provisional epistemic attitude could lead to: a friendlier acceptance of uncertainty, a lighter grasp on all our knowledge, an ongoing openness to change, an willingness to instigate change, an active search for the failure of all generalities (including the ones is this book), a willingness to question everything (even this statement), and finally, less epistemic arrogance. Adopting these seven would, I believe, make the world a better place. . . . But I only hold this belief provisionally. Given all that has been presented in this book, we are now free to take a leap of explicit self-reliance, facing squarely the truth that haunts us every second of our lives: we flourish or die depending on what we

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do. From here, our path is clear. We can point the remnants of our religious proclivities in a new direction, in the direction of the mysteries explored in chapter 10, directly experiencing a world that is shockingly strange, even perverse, and that thereby directly changes us into participators of the perverse—knowing and yet not comprehending the beautiful mysteries that lie at the core of our existence. Beauty and a genuine chance at survival await those of us who both contemplate the mysteries and at the same time realize that religion itself is a product of human evolution. The One Billion will claim that a better chance of survival awaits those who stop seeking distant horizons and instead focus on the challenge of dealing with a future of perhaps twenty-five billion humans on planet Earth and all their . . . stuff ! . . . ignoring utterly any mysteries, religious or scientific, and indeed ignoring anything that does not help with this pressing task. I wish the One Billion Godspeed. As for me, the sheer perversity of the universe beckons, and, its beauty filling my eyes, I cannot turn away.

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Notes

1. The Traveler to Excellent Beauty: Invited Rather Than Drafted 1. I’ve been informed by several rabbis that using this sacred name of the Jewish god is permissible in educational contexts. This book can be considered such a context. 2. A good place to learn more about Descartes is his entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/. We will return to dualism in chapter 10. 3. Chalmers’s argument for his brand of dualism can be found in his famous book The Conscious Mind. I recommend it. 4. How did Chalmers dodge the First Law of Thermodynamics? It is not clear that he has, or that he even wants to. He thinks that quantum mechanics might provide an out here. But perhaps his preferred solution is to suggest that the experiential realm doesn’t interact with the physical via exchange of energy: physical energy stays where it is suppose to: entirely in the realm of the physical. How, then, do the two realms interact? Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin, a “coin” more fundamental than either the physical or the experiential, and “both sides” always work together and cooperatively. Some details can be found in Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, and more in two papers: “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature” and most especially “The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief.” See also his book The Character of Consciousness.

2. What Is a Religion? 1. Including this last property places me approximately in the same camp as Mircea Eliade and Emile Durkheim. Eliade was a well-known historian and philosopher

2. W h a t I s a Re l i g i o n ? of religion. He said that the distinction between the sacred and the profane was fundamental to all religions. See Eliade, Sacred and the Profane. Durkheim, a famous French sociologist (he can be considered one of the founders of the field), also stressed the importance of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. See his Elementary Forms. A well-known criticism of views like Eliade’s and Durkheim’s is that there are cultures (especially prescientific ones) which do not draw the distinction between the sacred and the profane (or, better, the sacred and the mundane) and yet such cultures have religion—there has never been a human culture without religion. But a better way to describe such cultures is to say that their members live perpetually in a sacred realm, in a holy world, so of course they don’t draw the distinction . . . nothing around them is mundane. As we will see, in the last chapter, this view has much to tell us today. 2. See, for example, Russell, A History of Witchcraft. Russell, by the way, also discusses cultures that don’t distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. For a discussion of some of the psychology behind modern witchcraft, see Legare and Gelman, “Bewitchment, Biology or Both.” See also Legare et al., “The Coexistence of Natural and Supernatural Explanations Across Cultures and Development.” 3. Interestingly, many modern Wiccans subscribe to the same belief. See Cunningham, Earth Power.

3. The One Billion 1. See, for example, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious -landscape-unaffiliated/ and http://www.pewformum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on -the-rise/. Many of the unaffiliated report having some spiritual or religious beliefs. 2. John Lennon is an obvious example (see his song “Imagine”). But he was a musician, not a scientist. Several scientists and scholars have argued for this, however. See, for example, Dawkins, God Delusion; Dennett, Breaking the Spell; Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation; Hitchens, God Is Not Great; and, in my opinion, the real eye-opener: Harris, End of Faith. Also, check out Bill Maher’s documentary, Religulous. 3. Richard Dawkins first pointed this out in his book The God Delusion. 4. Pagels, Cosmic Code, 156. 5. See Peirce,“Fixation of Belief,” 1–15. Peirce’s view of science has been strongly criticized, most notoriously by the postmodernist movement. Postmodernists were (and are, there are still some around) dubious of the Peircean view of science. Indeed, this is one of the movement’s defining characteristics. They criticized everything: the notions of reality and real things, the notion of objective truth, and the existence of any genuine, objective point of view.They claimed that science was chock full of racism, sexism, classism, and the like that rendered it just one way of parsing “reality” (the scare quotes are for the postmodernists; they always wrote the word “reality” in scare quotes because they were dubious that there was one reality). Scientists in turn fought back, pointing out that the rabid relativism of the postmodern position rendered the view itself useless (since relativism applied equally to it). The scientists went on to point out that no one, especially the postmodernists, actually believed, or believes,

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4. T h e Tra ve l e r ’s D ark Night of t he Soul that “reality” was anywhere near as relative as the postmodernists claimed it to be (for example, postmodernists still seek out the scientifically best medical care). This all resulted in what was known as the science wars. The biggest salvo ever fired in the science wars was Sokal’s hoax: see Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense. Arguably, this killed the movement at least as far as the science wars were concerned. For more views, see, for example, Parsons, Science Wars; and Segerstrale, Beyond the Science Wars. 6. From Russell, “Free Man’s Worship.” 7. I emphasize “at least currently” because science might in fact be able to tell us how to minimize pain and maximize pleasure and why we morally ought to do to so. See Harris, Moral Landscape. 8. An important example of this sort of scientific theorizing can be found in Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. We will discuss this book in chapter 5. 9. And I am certainly not claiming that before the advent of robust science, everyone was religious. For starters, science in at least some form has been around as long as there have been humans.The cave fire, the cooking of meat, making and using weapons and other tools, and the invention of the wheel were scientific discoveries by very early, unknown, practical scientists. Second, and as an example, even many ancient Greeks, notably Aristotle, were not religious, or were at least only nominally religious. Aristotle, for example, merely respected the study of theology, but was not himself religious. (This, even though St. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s writings to ground his version of Christian theology.) 10. There is an important and disturbing caveat here. In their significant and authoritative book Sacred and Secular, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out that the long-heralded demise of religion, predicted by the likes of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury thinkers, has not happened. And it is probably not going to happen: religions are growing worldwide (that is, the number of people belonging to one religion or another is growing). What makes their findings disturbing is that Inglehart and Norris claim to have discovered that religions persist and grow in at-risk populations—populations in poor nations, nations under the rule of tyranny or the threat of terrorism, nations suffering large environmental degradation, and so on—where the members of the population face a decrease in existential security (Inglehart and Norris’s term). In populations where there is an increase in existential security (in affluent, safe nations), religious membership decreases. Planet Earth is a dangerous place and getting more dangerous every day: existential security is going down. So, religions are growing, in general. And the happy one billion secular, nonreligious people may be going the way of the dodo bird.

4. The Traveler’s Dark Night of the Soul 1. Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa. And see the Wikipedia entry for Mother Teresa. 2. This caprice-based view of the Old Testament deity is actually quite biblical. The Old Testament, in fact, never portrays God as just or as the source of morality. God clearly has regrets (as in the flood story, for example); hence he is neither

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4. T h e Tra ve l e r ’s D a r k N i g ht o f t he S o u l omniscient nor omnipotent. He is not omniscient (all knowing) because, if he were, he wouldn’t have made the mistake that caused his feeling regretful. And he is not omnipotent (all powerful) because, if he were, he could easily undo completely and repair what is now causing him regret. Finally, the God of the Old Testament is very willing to punish the just and the unjust alike; this is what the Book of Job is about. For more on this topic, see Segal, Joseph’s Bones. See also Segel, “Teaching the Bible in the Public Schools,” 22–26. 3. Santa Claus is a rotund, jolly mythic man (or possibly some sort of magical being like an elf) who, on Christmas Eve, brings toys to children all over Christendom (though this fact doesn’t prevent many Christian denominations and churches from opposing Santa Claus tooth and nail—mainly because Mr. Claus is, apparently, too secular). Santa travels in a small sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. His preferred mode of ingress and egress is down and then back up the house’s chimney. Santa Claus differs from culture to culture, in both attire and behavior. In some, he brings toys only to children that have been good; he brings coal to bad children (bad children are defined as those who don’t do what their parents tell them to do). Some say he will eat some cookies if you leave them for him. He is also called Father Christmas or St. Nicholas. Interestingly, he, or perhaps a close cousin, predates the Christianization of many European peoples. 4. An excellent book about the profound role of randomness in all our lives is Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk. 5. See, for example, Wakeless et al., “Lung Cancer Incidence.” 6. Within psychology, there is a large literature detailing that humans are naturally rather bad at dealing with randomness. In fact, humans often demonstrate a systematic irrationality when it comes to coping with randomness. For example, most humans are not very good at making probability assessments. Everything is implicated, from consulting tarot cards or the positions of the other planets and stars in the night sky to not accepting that, in the United States and Europe, one’s chances of dying from a terrorist act are far less than those of dying by crossing the street or getting killed by, say, a tornado. See Daniel Kahneman’s excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow, as well as www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html. Humans, however, are not uniformly bad at probability reasoning. We appear to be better at it when it comes to assessing who is cheating us and who isn’t. This sort of exception is studied in the field of evolutionary psychology. See, for example, Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, Adapted Mind. 7. Leibniz didn’t invent or discover the Principle; he merely stated it clearly. For the first quote, see Leibniz’s letter to Des Bosses. For the second, see Leibniz, Metaphysical Consequences, 172. 8. But it doesn’t do us any good if only God knows the reasons. So, we invented statistics and probability to tame the randomness. These two weren’t inventions so much as discoveries. The discovery and development of statistics and probability theory rank as one of humankind’s greatest achievements. See the appendix to this chapter for some important aspects of statistics and probability as they pertain to our spiritual traveling. 9. This isn’t the place to launch into a defense of the “stone cold mystery view” of philosophy. It is not a view widely held even by philosophers, oddly. For rea174

5. J u s t i f y i n g t h e Way s o f G o d t o M an via Evol ut ion sons passing understanding, most philosophers think they are solving problems, even though they are working on pretty much the same problems Aristotle worked on. Some say the problems are really, really hard, but that solutions are in the offing. Others grandly state their solutions—which no one believes but them. I refer the interested reader to the issue of Essays in Philosophy entitled “Philosophy’s Future,” http:// commons.pacificu.edu/eip/topics.html, and also my paper in that issue, “There is No Progress in Philosophy.” See also, Overgaard’s et. al. An Introduction to Metaphilosophy. 10. The Jobs of the world are not insane in any standard sense, but something peculiar is going on in their heads. A Washington Post/Harvard School of Public Health/Kaiser Foundation poll conducted in September 2005 found that Hurricane Katrina overwhelmingly strengthened survivors’ religious faith! See www.scribd.com/ doc/265355/Survey-of-Hurricane-Katrina-Evacuees, or look up “Washington Post/ Harvard School of Public Health/Kaiser Foundation Katrina poll.”

Appendix to Chapter 4. Statistics and Probability Meet Job 1. See Taleb, The Black Swan.

Part 2. The Biology of Religion, the Psychology of Morality 1. See, for example, statistics from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network at www.rainn.org/statistics. 2. The same is not true, apparently, of the victims of childhood sexual assault, especially incest. Such victims frequently lose their faith and religion. See Russell, Secret Trauma. 3. For the statistics on evolution, see J. D. Miller et al., “Public Acceptance of Evolution,” 765–766. The literature on how and why evolution is a major battleground in the war between science and religion is large. A good introduction is K. Miller, Only a Theory.

5. Justifying the Ways of God to Man via Evolution 1. There are other related scientific theories of the origins of religion out there. I’ve picked these two because they are well known and work together in a way that allows me to explain two of any religion’s most interesting properties: that religions invoke something supernatural, and that they are communal or social. However, recall from chapter 2 that we defined religion using three properties: being communal or social, endorsing and requiring the supernatural, and invoking ideas or feelings of the sacred or holy. Explaining the sacredness aspect of religion, just like defining it, is difficult. As also mentioned in chapter 2, in religion the sacred and the supernatural 175

5. Justi fyin g t he Way s o f G o d t o M a n v i a Evol ut ion are related. We’ll be able to glimpse that relation in the theory I propose. But a full explanation of our feelings and concepts of the sacred and holy will have to wait for further advances from at least the many branches of psychology (neuro-, cognitive, affective, evolutionary . . .), and who knows what else. 2. See Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia. 3. To get a sense of this, Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates that the number of different Christian denominations exceeds thirty-three thousand. 4. For chimpanzees, see Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor, Apes, as well as Deacon, Symbolic Species. For vervets, see Cheney and Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World. For dolphins, see chapter 13 of Hillix and Rumbaugh, Animal Bodies. For parrots, see Pepperberg, Alex Studies. And for a general survey, see Shettleworth, Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior. 5. For the details, see Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. 6. See Wilson, “A Theory of Group Selection,” 143–146. 7. See Sober and Wilson, Unto Others. 8. Dennett, Breaking the Spell. 9. Psychologists have amassed a very large literature on this topic. For one entry point, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception. 10. See Sagan, Demon-Haunted World. 11. The Great Lakes sea rocket—a kind of flowering plant found around . . . the Great Lakes—seems able to give preferential treatment to its kin. See Yoon, “Loyal to Its Roots.” 12. See Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 109. Dennett derived this nifty idea from Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” 29–34. 13. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 116–117. 14. Ibid., 118–119. Dennett derived this idea from Boyer, Religion Explained. 15. Dennett is not explicit about this ingredient, but it is clear he intends it. See Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 119–125. 16. Quite robust evidence of our penchant for weird explanations is seen in our human capacity to see nonrandom, intentional, or causal patterns in random, unintentional, fluke events. In short, we humans see purposeful reasons behind things that have no such reasons behind them. This is an important topic, and understanding it will further make my case that religion is due to our evolved psychologies. Since this topic is slightly tangential to my main goal, I have stuck the discussion of it in the appendix to this chapter. 17. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 120. 18. I should point out that Dennett and Wilson rather strongly disagree with each other, and each thinks it unlikely that the other’s theory is true. Dennett, a philosopher and so pugnacious by nature, is especially critical of Wilson’s theory. Dennett calls Wilson’s group selection theory “radical” (p. 184). And he says, for example, “According to Wilson, religion emerged by a process of group selection, a controversial wrinkle in evolutionary theory that is dismissed by many evolutionary theorists as at best a marginal process whose conditions for success are unlikely to arise and persist for long” (p. 106). But the claim that Wilson’s theory is a wrinkle is belied by the fact that Dennett and his colleagues have spent dozens of pages over many years trying to refute group selection theory. Wrinkles don’t warrant such attention. Fortunately for 176

7. Good Wit hout Gods us, we can skip this huge and rancorous debate. We have our own huge, rancorous debate to engage in.

Appendix to Chapter 5. Yes, There Really Is Such a Thing as a Coincidence 1. The discussion in this appendix derives from Stuart Vyse’s excellent book Believing in Magic. 2. Ibid., 71. 3. For the experiment on children, again, see ibid., 72–73. For the experiment on adults (university students), see ibid., 73–74. The reports mentioned in the text were all published in scientific psychology journals.The references for this are in Vyse.

6. Does God Want You Dead? 1. This central aspect of religion is also discussed in chapters 4 and 5 of Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. 2. Seven good places to start, if one is interested in learning more, are Alexander, Biology of Moral Systems; Cheney and Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World; Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, Adapted Mind; de Waal, Good Natured; Sober and Wilson, Unto Others; Joyce, Evolution of Morality; and Haidt, Righteous Mind. The literature expands out from here considerably. 3. For a seminal paper on this research, see Dugatkin, “Guppies,” 243–246. 4.Whether moral judgments are due to emotions or to rational, deliberative thought is an old (and still ongoing) problem in philosophy: for the emotional view, see Hume, Enquiry; for the rational thought view, see Kant, Groundwork. Science is now weighing in: see, for example, Miller, “Roots of Morality,” 734–737. And Haidt, Righteous Mind. 5. Most of the discussion in this section comes from Haidt, “New Synthesis,” 998–1002. The ideas discussed here are somewhat simplified when compared to his fuller theory in his book The Righteous Mind. For example, he has added to and slightly changed the five psychological foundations of morality as well as added other psychological features that carry moral weight. But the simplified version will due for our purposes. You might also want to check out Haidt’s homepage. 6. Haidt has found just this correlation in his research.

7. Good Without Gods 1. There are some very interesting nontraditional Christians and Muslims who do take seriously rules against harming and being unfair. For just one example, see Spong, Sins of Scripture. 177

7. G ood W i t h o u t G o d s 2. David Wilson, whom we met in chapter 5, tells people that he is an atheist, but a nice atheist. He was quoted as saying this in a New York Times interview with Natalie Angier, published December 24, 2002. 3. For two modern defenses of consequentialism, see Hooker, Ideal Code; and Singer, How Are We to Live. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consequentialism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism. 4. See, for example, statistics at rainn.org. 5. The classic statement of deontology is by Immanuel Kant, though, as usual in philosophy, Kant fails to apply his view universally, as required. See, for example, Kant, Groundwork. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: http://plato .stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/. 6. This Latin quotation is usually attributed to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, a Roman statesman.

9. The Janus-Faced Hominid 1. A couple hundred thousand years or about fifty thousand years, depending on when you start counting. Homo sapiens has been around about four hundred thousand years. What is called archaic Homo sapiens lived from about four hundred thousand years ago to about 250,000 years ago. Then what is often dubbed Homo sapiens sapiens took over and continues to this day (this is you). But technology (in the form of stone tools) and science progressed quite slowly in Homo sapiens sapiens until about fifty thousand years ago, when what is called the great leap forward occurred. At that time, for reasons that are still unclear, human culture (in all its forms) took off and progressed quite rapidly. See, for example, Diamond, Third Chimpanzee. 2. Brights are people whose worldview is devoid of any supernatural or mystical elements. To learn about the Brights, see their homepage: www.the-brights.net/. 3. See Weinberg’s well-known book First Three Minutes. 4. See Dawkins, God Delusion; Dennett, Breaking the Spell; Hitchens, God Is Not Great; and Harris, End of Faith. 5. Actually, the situation may not be this dire. We may be slowly but surely creating our replacement “species”—artificial life and artificial intelligence. See Dietrich, “After the Humans Are Gone.” 6. Perhaps a better way to stamp out religion is to produce a worldwide, lowstress society. See, for example, Paul, “Religion Tied to Socioeconomic Status,” where he says, “In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia. . . . Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear

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10. S o m e S t ra n g e n ess in t he Propor t ion losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity. . . . Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.” See also Paul, “Chronic Dependence.” Paul’s theory of the dependence of religion on harsh living conditions means that Paul doubts a major thesis of this book: being religious is an evolutionary part of the human makeup. In “Religion Tied to Socioeconomic Status,” Paul says, “serious religiosity cannot be the strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion.” But as a practical matter, Paul’s theory couldn’t help much: our ever increasing population and the associated worldwide environmental degradation seem to doom human societies the world over to an increasingly harsh life and hence, even if Paul is right, to increasing religiosity. See also chapter 3, note 10. 7. See Gould, Rocks of Ages. All page references in this section will be to this book. 8. For a different view about commending Mother Theresa, see Hitchens, God Is Not Great. 9. The paper is Legare and Gelman, “Bewitchment, Biology, or Both.”

Part 4. The Heretic’s Way: Into the Mysterious Realm 1. Quoted from Cho, “Tevatron’s Epitaph,” 1687–1688.

10. Some Strangeness in the Proportion 1. See Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” 435–450. This is one of the most important philosophy papers in the last century. It is reprinted in Nagel, Mortal Questions. You can also find it online in a number of places. 2. For one description of what this is like, told by a synesthete, see Tammet, Born on a Blue Day. 3. For more on what science can’t explain about consciousness, see the book I wrote with Valerie Hardcastle: Sisyphus’s Boulder. 4. Worse (or better?), we may already be living in a computer simulation. I refer the intrepid reader to Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?,” 243–255. 5. Denying that we are selves is considered the tough, scientific, no-nonsense thing to do nowadays. One good example of the “no selves” view is detailed in Metzinger, Being No One. Such a view is crazy, of course. One can feel that one is a self; one knows this with complete certainty. One knows this by direct and infallible introspection.Your self is what unifies your consciousness (conscious experiences), or what constitutes the unification of your consciousness. 6. The way of presenting this proof is inspired by William Dunham’s excellent book Journey Through Genius. Another superb book containing this proof and much,

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10. S ome S t ra n g e n e s s i n t h e P r o p o r t i o n much more on infinity, its history, and its shocking properties is Wallace, Everything and More. The first person to discover this proof was the great mathematician Georg Cantor. Cantor discovered a lot of what we are discussing here. There is some serious speculation that Cantor’s research into infinity and beyond drove him insane, or at least contributed to his insanity, which is discussed in both Dunham’s book and Wallace’s. 7. I’m skipping over some heady technicalities here, like the Continuum Hypothesis, which states that there is no infinity between ℵ0 and ℵ1. This in turn means that there is a smallest transfinite cardinal, namely ℵ0. The Continuum Hypothesis, big surprise, was first suggested by Cantor in 1877. The hypothesis itself leads off into a land of strange mathematics. Also, I should note that some mathematicians don’t think that infinity comes in sizes, but rather in differing complexities. Little work has been done on this topic, however. Nevertheless, the message is the same: infinities come in different types. 8. And it upsets people. I have had many a student vociferously object to the ideas just presented. Several mathematicians objected vociferously to these ideas when Cantor introduced them. And many theologians objected also, saying that Cantor’s theory supported pantheism. But the most famous—and worst—case of someone reacting negatively to infinity is that of the great philosopher Aristotle. He was so upset by infinity that he banned it. He insisted that infinity was always only potential, that there could never be actual infinities. The ideas of ℵ1 or ℵ9 would have made Aristotle apoplectic. And he would’ve hated Cantor. This is no small thing. Because of the Dark Ages, and the role the rediscovery of Aristotle’s work and the work of other ancient Greeks played in bringing those sad ages to a close, Aristotle was elevated to the status of demigod, and his work became a kind of holy writ. Even though Isaac Newton sort of rescued infinity by using it in his calculus, infinity remained under the Aristotelian ban up through Cantor’s work. In fact, it was because of Aristotle that Cantor met with the resistance that he did. The ban was lifted in the twentieth century, not by decree, but by general assent that Cantor was right. Old Aristotle had an enormous amount of influence for someone so wrong. See Dunham, Journey Through Genius, and Wallace, Everything and More. 9. For a very good introduction to quantum mechanics written for lay people, see Al Khalili, Quantum. Wikipedia is also a good place to get started. 10. Perhaps we macro beings don’t even exist; see Merricks, Objects and Persons.

11. The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand 1. The sheer power of this ideal is well analyzed in Israel, Radical Enlightenment. 2. At the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, high-energy particle physics may be coming to the end of the Enlightenment ideal. The stunning discovery of the Higgs Boson didn’t go according to plan, it appears. So barring some new discovery, explanation beyond the current standard model may be ending. I refer the interested reader to “New Physics Complications Lend Support to the Multiverse Hypothesis,” Scientific American, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new

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12. T h e P e r s o n a l M y s t e r y a nd t he I mpersonal God -physics-complications-lend-support-to-multiverse-hypothesis. Here’s a relevant quotation from the article: “In peril is the notion of ‘naturalness,’ Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained. Without it, physicists face the harsh prospect that those laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time.” Nevertheless, the Enlightenment ideal, and Einstein’s dream, is still in place—the results from the Large Hadron Collider are not widely known or widely understood. 3. This quotation is often attributed to Isaac Asimov.

Appendix to Chapter 11. Welcome to the Inscrutable 1. And it is at work, full force, in two other well-regarded metaphysical tomes: Heil, The Universe as We Find It, and Sider, Writing the Book of the World. All three philosophers, Chalmers, Heil, and Sider, are strongly in favor of the view that the world is understandable. All three assume science, especially fundamental physics, does and will continue to contribute substantially to the correct metaphysical theory. And all three, like most metaphysicians (and, interestingly, like most mathematicians), try to get by with a minimal collection of basic notions. They then try to derive the whole world we know and love from this smaller, basic collection. 2. See the introduction and chapter 1 of Chalmers, Constructing the World. 3. The nonliteral definitions here are taken from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary. 4. The relation between Chalmers’s scrutability thesis and the excellent beauties is more complex than I’ve indicated here. Discussing that relation would, unfortunately, take us too far from this book’s main goals.

12. The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God 1. I get this a lot. Jesus’s imminent return is responsible for much justifying of environmental destruction. Another version I hear often is that since the Christian god created the world, humans can do nothing to harm it. This is horrible reasoning. The Christian god (supposedly) created humans, too, yet we do vile and terrible things to one another, and to one another’s children, every second of every day. 2. A great example of which we should all be proud is how we’ve so far kept from blowing ourselves up with thermonuclear bombs. We didn’t just pray. We rolled up our sleeves, set up committees, and got to work. We negotiated treaties—flawed treaties, but they’ve worked for well over half a century now. We inspected, talked, and kept working. And for the time being, at least, we are somewhat safe from this self-inflicted danger. 3. I could be accused of being overly optimistic here. Humans are very clever. Some of them could no doubt find a religious way to manipulate or enslave others

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12. T h e Pe r s o n a l M y s t e r y a n d t h e Im p e r s onal God using, say, the mystery of dark energy. But they couldn’t do it without changing such knowledge utterly. For starters, a religion formed from the mysteries would have to deify them somehow, or derive deities from them. This is required in order to make the mysteries supernatural (our next topic). They also would have to force the knowledge of the mysteries to be arcane. As discussed, this is now very hard to do: Schrodinger’s Cat is already out of the bag. 4. See Koch, Quest for Consciousness, as well as Dietrich and Hardcastle, Sisyphus’s Boulder, chaps. 4 and 5.

13. Summa Mysteriologica 1. See part 1, “Theology,” of Summa Theologica. 2. “We live in a dappled world, a world rich in different things, with different natures, behaving in different ways.The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid.” From Cartwright, A Dappled World, 1.

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Index

Alexander, L., 178 Alexander, R., 177n2 Al Khalili, J., 143, 180n9 Aquinas, St. T., 167, 173n9 astrology, 68 atheism, 24, 93–94, 158 Australopithecus, 76 Barkow, J., 174n6, 177n2 Barrett, D., 176nn2, 3 Barrett, J., 176n12 Baudelaire, C., 68 birthday paradox, 143 black swans, 48, 175n1 Bostrom, N., 179n4 Boyer, P., 176n14 Brooks, M., 145, 146 C3PO, 125 Cantor, 132, 135, 149, 180nn6–8 Cantor’s Diagonal Proof, 132–35 cardinality of sets, 129, 132, 135–37 Cartwright, N., 146, 169, 182n2 Catholic Church, xiii, xiv, 155 causation, 42–43, 139–41 Chalmers, D., 5, 152–53, 171nn3, 4, 181nn1, 2, 4

Cheney, D., 176n4, 177n2 Cho, A., 179n1 color inversion, 118 Commander Data, 125 commonplace, the, 136–42 computational theory of mind, 4 consciousness, 6, 115–21, 123, 126–28, 142 consequentialism, 83–86, 89, 104, 145 Cunningham, S., 172n3 dark energy, 5, 138, 150, 163, 165, 182n3 dark matter, 5, 138, 150, 163, 165 Dawkins, R., 94, 172nn2, 3, 178n4 De Waal, F., 75, 177n2 Deacon, T., 176n4 Dennett, D., 51, 56–61, 98, 172n2, 176nn8, 12–15, 17–18, 178n4 Dennett-Wilson theory, 62–64 deontology, 88–89, 104, 178n5 Descartes, 2, 3, 96, 121 Diamond, J., 178n1 Dietrich, E., 144, 178n5, 182n4 Dietrich, E., and V. Hardcastle, 182n4 Dostoyevsky, F., 24 dualism, 2–6

I ndex Dugatkin, L., 177n3 Dunham, W., 132, 179n6, 180nn6, 8 Durkheim, E., 171n1, 172n1

Kaplan, R., 143 Kennedy, J., 144 Koch, C., 182n4 Kolodiejchuk, B., 173n1

Eliade, M., 171n1, 172n1 facts, 1 First Law of Thermodynamics, 3, 10, 171 Galileo, xiii–xiv Ghost Dances, 109 ghosts, 14, 104, 122, 163 Gödel, K., 144 Goldstein, R., 144 Gould, S., 21, 103, 104, 105, 106, 148, 179n7 grok, 153–54 Haide, J., 78, 80, 177nn2, 4, 5, 6 Harris, S., 172n2, 173n7, 178n4 Havi, J., 143 Heil, J., 181n1 Heinlein, R., 153 Heuristic of Sufficient Reason, 43 Hilbert, D., 149 Hillix, W., 176n4 Hitchens, C., 172n2, 178n4, 179n8 Holocaust, 25 Homo erectus, 54, 76 Homo hablis, 54, 76 Homo religiosus, 155 Homo sapiens, 178 Hooker, B., 178n3 Hume, D., 140, 141, 177n4 infinity, 115, 128–32, 135–37, 142 Inglehart, R., 173n10 Israel, J., 180n1 Job (Book of ), 29–31, 46 Joyce, R., 177n2 Kahneman, D., 174n6 Kant, I., 177n4, 178n5

190

Large Hadron Collider, 113, 181n2 LSD, 120 Legare, C., and S. Gelman, 12, 172n2, 179n9 Legare, C., and E. M. Evans, 172n2 Leibniz, G. W., 41, 88, 174n7 lichens, 54, 103 Maher, B., 172n2 marijuana, 120 Matrix, The, 96, 121–23 McGinn, C., 145 Merricks, T., 180n10 Metzinger, T., 179n5 Miller, G., 177n4 Miller, J. D., 175n3 Miller, K., 175n3 Mlodinow, L., 174n4 Moore, M., 178 Mother Teresa, 28–29, 99, 173n1 Müller-Lyer Illusion, 95 Nagel, T., 117, 124, 145, 179n1 nonoverlapping magisterial, 103–6 Overgaard, S., 175n9 Pagels, H., 19, 172n4 Parsons, K., 173n5 Paul, G., 178n6, 179n6 Peirce, C. S., 19, 20, 172n5 Pepperberg, I., 176n4 Phoenix Lander, 136 physicalism, 3–5, 119 Pilgrim’s Progress, xv Pirates of the Caribbean, 124–25 Pope, Alexander, 41 Poundstone, W., 145 Priest, G., 144 Principle of Sufficient Reason, 41–43

I ndex probability, 46 problem of evil, xvi, 30 Prozac, 120 quantum mechanics, 42–43, 119, 139–40, 143–44, 152–53, 163, 165–66, 171, 180 rape, 13, 156, 175n1 rarity, 115, 136, 149 religion, definition of, 10–14 R2D2, 125 Russell, B., 173n6 Russell, D., 175n2 Russell, J., 172n2 Sagan, C., 57, 176n10 Savage-Rumbaugh, S., 176n4 Science wars, 173n5 scrutability, 152–54 Segal, J., 174n2 Segall, M., 95 Segerstrale, U., 173n5 Seyfarth, R., 176n4, 177n2 Shettleworth, S., 176n4 Sider, T., 181n1 Singer, P., 178n3 Smolin, L., 143, 144 Sober, E. 176n7, 177n2 Sokal’s Hoax, 173n5 Sorensen, R., 145

Spong, J., 177n1 Stonehenge, 9, 14–15, 22 Taleb, N., 175n1 Tammet, D., 179n2 Tevatron Collider (Fermi National Laboratory), 113–14, 149, 165, 179n4 transcendental numbers, 138, 150 transfinite cardinals, 135 transfinite realm, 135 UFOs, 13–14, 23, 163 Verbal Kint, 68 Voynich Manuscript, 145 Vyse, S., 66, 177nn1, 3 Wakeless, H., 174n5 Wallace, D., 132, 180nn6, 8 Weinberg, S., 100, 178n3 Wilson, D., 51, 53–56, 60–64, 98, 102, 107, 173n8, 176nn5, 6, 18, 177n1, 178n2 Wolchover, N., 180n2 Xanax, 120 Yoon, C., 176n11 Yourgrau, P., 144 zombies, 123–27

191