Truth

Stanley Fish, a columnist I recommend, wrote in the New York Times last week about “Atheism and Evidence”. His argument was an old one that one hears from the very religious – that truth is constructed, and both science and religion are based on faith, so one is just as valid as the other.

I will concede that science is also based on faith. We don’t have direct experience of all that science tells us, yet we choose to accept it, really on faith.

The question of which is the more valid hinges on how great a leap of faith is required.

In my entry from last week, I noted how while most Americans say they have faith in science, in practice they hold to very unscientific beliefs. People hold those beliefs simply because they seem to work OK for them. As a guide to a good life, religion works pretty well for many people.

One chooses the truth that one finds most fruitful as a guide to living one’s life. Religion for many is a kind of rule of thumb for righteous living.

This is only understandable if one recognizes that what we call “truth” is really just a proposition about reality. The religious tend to believe that Truth has a capital “T”, that there are fixed, eternal, immutable truths, just as the fundamentalists believe that species are fixed and immutable. Science tells us that everything is in motion, everything experiences constant change, nothing stands still but everything evolves.

Science starts from the hypothesis, which is a kind of proposition. Let’s assume that something will work, and then test it out in practice. If it works, it’s a valid guide to action. Science assumes that truth is not fixed, that what works under most circumstances will not work under all circumstances. But if “by and large, for the most part” (to borrow a phrase from Aristotle) it holds true, if experiments produce verifiable and repeatable results, we can trust the hypothesis.

Religion is pre-scientific – it offers truths that it does not feel obliged to prove through evidence. For example, many religions recommend faith in the power of prayer. Science says, rather than just accept that prayer is powerful, let’s test it in practice. Thus a large study funded by the John Templeton Foundation tested the power of prayer in practice – and found no evidence that it had any positive effect on the health of heart patients.

Many atheists will conclude that religious folks are acting irrationally when they pray. But I think we have to understand that the object of the healing power of prayer is not the person prayed for, but the person doing the praying.

Human beings desperately want to believe that they can have some power over the tempestuous world we live in. Believing in prayer gives them hope that they can somehow bring about a positive outcome, even in circumstances where they are quite powerless. Believing that one has power to bring about positive outcomes, that there is always something one can do, is a very healthy mindset. Prayer therefore has a very concrete benefit – otherwise people would not be praying.

One has faith in the truths that seem to yield the best results.

Science

I listened to a podcast lecture yesterday by Harvard history of science professor Steven Shapin. Shapin argues that science is becoming so loose a term used by so many – think creation science, scientology, etc. – and so few people live by science, that perhaps the term has lost all meaning, and certainly that the modern consciousness is not scientific.

He cites a number of sad statistics about Americans – that more than 90% believe in God, 82% believe in a physical Heaven, 84% believe in the survival of the soul after death, more than 50% reject evolution, that more than 25% believe the sun revolves around the Earth, and so on – as evidence that while people talk as if they respect science, they don’t actually know what it is.

Furthermore he states he has never heard a convincing definition of the scientific method. Which prompts this entry.

Let me start with an interesting point Shapin makes. He points out that at some point in our culture, scientists conceded some important ground to religion. They began to argue that science had nothing to say about morality, in fact that science and morality were mutually exclusive. Science was not about morality, and morality was not about science. They were all too willing to surrender the hard questions to the mystics and the divines, the priests and the pastors, because they had no scientific answers to offer.

One of my goals for this blog is to find a way to bridge science and morality, to show that morality can be explained through a range of scientific discoveries, not least of which was the work of Darwin and his intellectual descendents.

In part this is an epistemological question. Scientists, if they were worth their salt, learned early in their careers that absolute certainty had no place in science. Science is not the search for absolute truths – in fact physics has proven that all is in a state of flux and impermanence, and there are no absolutes.

Aware of this, and no doubt influenced by the religious cultures in which they were born and bred, scientists in the Enlightenment began to argue that their endeavors were much humbler and more practical than those of the spiritual leaders. They operated on a different plane.

Today in America one frequently comes across a curious belief that religious convictions are sacrosanct, above question, and that anyone has the perfect right to believe any sort of nonsense if it seems to have a “spiritual” basis. The rules don’t apply. It’s the split between faith and reason.

This split often shows up in the individual themselves. Something over 50% of American scientists, people who make their daily living from rationality, believe in a God, and seem quite comfortable with this split brain. Orwell called it double-think – the ability to firmly believe in two contradictory ideas at the same time.

Prof. James T. Hall cites a lecture he attended given by an evangelical. The speaker distinctly contradicted himself in his talk. When Prof. Hall questioned him on this, his reply was too the effect that, yes it was true that he had contradicted himself, but that didn’t matter, because “this is not science, this is religion.” Oh. OK then.

Survival

The concept of survival of the fittest conjures images of individual struggle red tooth and claw. But the popular conception, focused as it is on survival of the individual, misses the point, because the real stuff of life, DNA and other genetic material, does not reside in the individual. And for good reason – the individual is mortal. The real blueprint for life resides in the species.

I’ve turned to this topic after watching the television show “Nature”, which this evening featured a life-and-death struggle between a pack of African wild dogs and a Wildebeest mother and calf.

The pack cut the pair off from the herd and attacked them repeatedly over 30 minutes, several times downing the young calf and mauling it savagely. But each time the frenzied mother drove the dogs off, until, exhausted, the pack lay down in the grass and watched the pair trot to safety back in the herd.

Those who are stuck on the idea that survival of the fittest is about the fittest, strongest individual have no explanation for the behaviour of the Wildebeest mother. Why should an individual put itself in mortal danger to protect its kin? By risking death, doesn’t the Wildebeest’s behaviour prove that it’s not all about survival?

This supposed “tough nut” is sometimes called the altruism problem. Why do soldiers march off to die on the battlefield? Why does a perfect stranger leap into the rapids to save a drowning child? If it’s all about our own survival, why put ourselves at risk for anyone at all?

The answer of course is that the survival that counts is never the survival of the individual, which in any eventuality is doomed in the long term anyway. The real goal is the survival of the species, because the species is what carries and transmits the blueprint for replication and regeneration.

DNA and other genetic materials are the vessel for the learning of the mass of individuals, now dead and gone, whose experience made the species what it is.

When the Wildebeest mother fights off the wild dogs, she gives life to her calf, and whatever courage and fearlessness she possessed that gave her the will to fight the pack now will live on in her offspring. Thus the species learns, because those who don’t fight back don’t pass on their fighting genes.

It is whatever contributes to the survival of the gene pool that defines “fitness”, not necessarily strength or savagery or cunning or camouflage. The soldier who goes off to fight to defend his country is in part defending his gene pool.

But recall that the learning of the species does not only reside in the genetic material. It also resides in the culture. So the soldier is also defending or advancing his culture, if necessary, with his own individual life. This is how the culture survives.

The survival of the fittest is really the survival of the learning of the species. That learning which is most conducive to survival will carry on. Insofar as altruism promotes the survival of the species, it will persist.

Individuality

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
-- Albert Einstein

The fact of humanity as a collective being is not a remarkable concept. What is remarkable is how one can carry on life’s daily activities, one of billions of others shuffling across the face of the planet doing much the same sort of thing, and still maintain a firm belief in one’s own individuality.

We distinguish ourselves with our styles and our fashions and our “unique” thoughts, apparently unaware that the very things that mark us off as individuals “different from the rest” are themselves the products of a collective culture to which we as individuals make only a vanishingly small contribution.

This blog, so unique to my own thoughts, is one of perhaps hundreds of millions of others, each as certain of its own individuality as my own.

Every human being has two souls, one a product of individual experience, and the other the product of the collective experience of the human species.

The collective soul is carried in two vessels: the DNA in which is encoded the blueprint for the species, and the culture, in which is encoded the collective actual experience of humanity.

As I’ve tried to say in an earlier post, what we call the “soul” is nothing other than the learning of the species. The soul lives in the genetic material.

But the learning of the species resides not only in the human body. Perhaps the greatest distinguishing feature of the human species is that we are the only animal that stores its learning outside of its own mortal body.

The soul of humanity in 2007 resides as much on the Internet as it does in the human genome.

What is DNA but the distilled experience of the human species? And what is the Internet but the memory of the human race?

Transcendentalism

I’m just listening to a lecture series on Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists that ties into the last post about Plato and the concept of forms.

I admire Emerson and Thoreau and the Unitarians in general, because for me they mark a stepping stone away from traditional Christianity in the direction of a more naturalistic interpretation of the world. A step in the direction of materialism, though they would vehemently deny it.

The Transcendentalists argue, as I gather from these lectures, that there is something that transcends nature and matter, but that spiritual force is to be found within nature itself. Influenced by eastern spiritualism, they denied a distance between humanity and God, and insisted that God is within us and around us in nature and can be experienced directly by man without need of an intermediary such as a priest or church.

From there it’s just a skip and hop and you’re saying that we and nature are God, pure and simple. This dangerous idea was rejected by mainstream religion of the day as Deism, the doctrine that we cannot know God, or even atheism, the notion that there is no supernatural God.

I’ll be arguing in this blog that what we call God is just code for natural phenomena, for a nexus of concepts and symbols referring to humanity and its relationship to the natural world.

The Forms

Plato made some interesting arguments that still have life these many centuries later.

One of these was the notion that there are “forms” which exist on a more perfect plane. In his parable of the cave, Plato argued that we can see these forms only dimly, like shadows on the wall of a cave.

The world of matter was for Plato essentially corrupt and temporal, and therefore while it seems real to the unenlightened, it is less real than the forms, because while matter decays and dies, the forms live on.

To pick up on my point from the last post, again I think Plato here is recognizing something eternal in the soul of man – and that little something is not ethereal or immaterial, it is simply DNA. He writes of this or that horse which lives and dies, but never can be described as the perfect horse. Meanwhile, we have a concept of the form of a horse that allows us to recognize one when we see it.

What Plato, limited by the science of his day, could not see, is that the form of the horse, the blueprint for all horsiness if you like, is recorded in DNA and other genetic material. That record is not a mere concept, it is laid out in complex proteins and other real matter. What Plato meant by forms is DNA.

Another thought came to me the other day about Plato – he argued that not all knowledge can come from experience, because some knowledge is innate. To illustrate he tells a story of teaching an uneducated slave boy some geometry, which the boy immediately grasps. The conclusion is that if the knowledge of math were not innate, the boy could never learn it so quickly.

Plato is right – our brains are capable of learning and understanding math. But what he could not know is that this is so because of knowledge gained through experience. Not the experience of the individual, but the experience of all their ancestors, as recorded and encoded in DNA and other genetic material.

The Soul

What is the soul?

In various religious traditions, the soul is referred to as the immortal essence, the spirit, the “higher self”. The soul is generally considered to be “immaterial”, meaning not made of matter but in some way supernatural, existing on a higher plane.

These religious interpretations of the concept of the soul can now be answered by science. The immortal essence of humanity is DNA, RNA, and other genetic material that achieves immortality by copying itself through successive generations.

The soul is therefore NOT immaterial. The ancients recognized that our bodies were just “envelopes for the soul”, but lacked the science to identify the substance of the soul itself. Their stories were naïve interpretations of a genuine natural phenomenon.

Part of what this blog wants to argue is that it is all too easy to dismiss the naïve interpretations of the ancients as ignorance, and to miss the deeper truths they tried to express.

Medieval paintings of winged souls departing the body for the great beyond may seem like pure fantasy, but they symbolized something of enormous importance for humanity. Even after our mortal remains have scattered to dust, there is a part of us that lives on - a part of us that is a record of our own experience, and a record of the uncounted generations before us who left us the legacy of their genetic material.

Mention made in the classics of the “World Soul”, or the “Soul of Humanity”, are inklings of an understanding that in vital ways we share our soul with our fellow human beings.

In fact, since all life is on a journey towards immortality, we share a soul not just with those creatures whose DNA is very close to our own. We share a soul with all species who use DNA to overcome time.

When the ancients write of “Spirit”, I think of that common spirit shared by all living things – the desire to persist through time and to overcome mortality and decay.

When current religious traditions speak of how the body is a mere envelope for the soul, and the soul is a mere envelope for the spirit, I understand what they are saying better than they do themselves. The body is just an envelope for DNA, and DNA is just an envelope for the mainspring of life – the desire to defeat and overcome time itself.