What Do Those Terms Mean?

Due to a number of factors, it’s been a little while since I made a post on either this or my Bible blog. Among the factors affecting this blog in particular has been a lack of subjects that raised enough motivation to inspire a complete blog post. And it’s not, really, that there have been too few subjects to talk about so much as too many. That’s made it hard to pick out a subject to bring front and center over the others for long enough to complete a post.

Well, that has changed in the last few days. And while there are now a couple subjects I wish to post on, today’s article will be on the subject of a few scientific terms that are getting massively and ignorantly abused these days: “Theory of Evolution,” and “Second Law of Thermodynamics.” Both of these terms are thrown out as criticisms of evolution, mostly by someone who understands neither concept claiming that they somehow disprove that evolution occurs.

First, I want to take a look at “Theory of Evolution.” Specifically, I’m addressing the claim that “It’s only a guess; that’s why it’s called the ‘Theory,’ of Evolution!” This is what is called an equivocation fallacy. If you’re not familiar with what an equivocation fallacy is, it’s when you treat two different concepts as if they were the same thing for the purpose of trying to make an argument about one of them by arguing about the other.

What are the two concepts being equivocated here? The colloquial usage of the word “theory,” versus the scientific usage of the word “theory.” It’s kind of unfortunate that they use the same word so differently, because it makes this particular equivocation so very easy for people to make. But hopefully this can clear things up a little bit.

See, in conversational usage, a theory is basically just a guess at an explanation for something, and it pretty much just stops there. This usage is closer to what, in science, would be called a hypothesis, and it is only a starting point. Scientists don’t get to stop there. Once they’ve made that guess (that hypothesis), they then have to test it. Usually, this involves making predictions of things that would have to be true in the real world if their hypothesis is correct, then performing tests to see if those predictions are true. If the real world doesn’t bear out the hypothesis, then it must be discarded or modified. The new hypothesis is then tested. Over and over, until you arrive at a hypothesis that passes all of the tests that you devise.

But even then, it still isn’t a theory. A hypothesis that reaches this stage must then be exposed to other scientists, including a complete explanation of the hypothesis and a detailed description of all the tests  performed and data that supports it. Then it is up to these other scientists to try and disprove it. They try to duplicate your test results. They try to devise their own tests. All of this is aimed at demonstrating that you aren’t fooling yourself, or that you didn’t miss some crucial piece of information, or even that you aren’t simply lying.

Once the scientific community has had their way with your hypothesis and come to accept that it is most likely correct, then and only then does it become a theory. In scientific usage, a theory is an explanation that has been so thoroughly documented, tested, retested, updated, and tested again that it has become a virtual certainty. There is no higher level of certainty afforded to a scientific explanation. To call the Theory of Evolution “just a theory” is like calling Usain Bolt “just a sprinter,” or Isaac Newton “just a mathematician.”

To put it another way, do you doubt that you will fall if you jump off a cliff just because the scientific explanation for why is called the “Theory” of Gravity? Do you doubt that viruses and bacteria cause illness just because the explanation for how is called the Germ “Theory” of Disease? Do you reject the idea that the earth orbits the sun because it’s called the “Theory” of Heliocentricity? Because that is the level of certainty that scientists are talking about when they reference the “Theory” of Evolution.

I have to admit that it’s a little aggravating to have to explain this, because it’s basic Middle School science. Virtually every child in the United States should have had this explanation in school. So anyone parroting “it’s just a theory,” as an adult, and pretending that makes it OK to dismiss scientific theories out of hand, has allowed their religion to actively destroy knowledge that was already contained in their heads.

The second term, Second Law of Thermodynamics, is a bit more understandable. After all, it’s kind of an advanced subject that doesn’t really get tackled until Physics class in High School. And even then, it’s done pretty superficially, and the implications may not be soundly explained until college (and then, only if you’re taking technical classes).

The way this is misused by creationists is basically in the following form: “The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all systems tend to disorder. Since living things are highly complex order, and evolution says they arise out of the disorder of random chemical reactions, the Second Law of Thermodynamics means evolution is impossible.”

Now this one can be a difficult one to explain accurately without trying to teach you thermodynamics; something that normally takes multiple semesters of specialized college courses. That’s actually why this is such an effective line of bullshit – it sounds smart and scientific, and most people simply aren’t going to have the education to understand why it is completely and utterly wrong. And I, unfortunately, am going to have to try and explain to a lay audience who doesn’t have that background why it is wrong.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not about order and disorder, but about the direction that energy flows in a system and how much of it is available to do work. It says that energy always flows from regions of high energy density to regions of lower energy density, and never the reverse. Which means that, over time, a closed system will tend toward equalization. This means the energy density will be equal everywhere, and no energy will be available to do any work (such as organizing things). Since, in that state, nothing can be done, this is often characterized as the state of maximum disorder. Hence the claim that the Second Law says that all systems tend inevitably to disorder (which, you’ll probably notice, is not in the sense we generally mean when we say “disorder” in casual conversation).

Now, the words “over time,” and “closed system” are italicized in the above description because they are important. Because in the real world, nothing ever happens instantaneously, and there is no such thing as a closed system (which is one in which there are no interactions whatsoever with anything outside the system). The earth, for example, is constantly bombarded with energy from the sun (which has a vastly higher energy density, so the one-way flow demanded by the Second Law is maintained), and that constant input of energy means that systems on the earth don’t tend toward thermodynamic equilibrium at all. There’s a huge amount of energy available to do work (such as the work of organizing living systems).

You see, the 2nd Law, like all scientific laws, is descriptive. It describes what we observe to be happening in reality. And the fact is that spontaneous organization happens all the time. We observe it when snowflakes crystallize, or when quartz crystals form. And yes, in the complex chemistry of living systems. These are observed realities. If the 2nd Law claimed that these observations were impossible, then the 2nd Law would be demonstrably wrong and would have to be discarded or reformulated in a way that didn't contradict reality. But thermodynamics is a pretty well understood science, so the chances of that happening are vanishingly small.

I hope you can see from these brief discussions how the standard apologetics on these topics are extremely misleading. They are used to throw a scientific gloss over specious arguments, because that makes them sound profound when they are in fact merely uninformed. What makes them seem effective is that they can be dashed off in thirty seconds, but take hours of effort backed by years of education to refute in even so basic and abbreviated a form as I've been able to do here. I hope seeing this will encourage readers to seek clarification on scientific topics from scientists rather than theologians.

Why a National Day of Prayer?

“The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals”

That is the text of a law which will once again be rearing its ugly head tomorrow. Here’s another law.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Do you see a conflict? I sure do. The national Day of Prayer very clearly violates the First Amendment to the Constitution (that’s the second quote there, for those who might be unfamiliar).

Yes, I am well aware that this law withstood a Constitutional challenge in the courts. Of course, it did so not by ruling whether it violated the law, but by ruling that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue because it didn’t cause concrete harm. Essentially, the court decided that officially alienating anybody whose religious beliefs do not include “turning to God in prayer and meditation,” does not constitute a harm done to them by the government. In other words, laws that clearly violate the constitution are allowable as long as they don’t cause harm (or the harm is sufficiently nebulous to hand-wave away). But the fact remains that this is a law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Not only that, it really is a Christian-specific law if you look at the wording. Only Christians use “God” as if it were a name – the Jewish faith prefers not to write the word at all, Muslim faiths tend to use the title “Allah,” (though the meaning is essentially the same), and of course many non-Abrahamic religions only use it in the lower-case sense as a descriptor. Wording meant to be inclusive of all religious people would have been something like “their god or gods,” rather than “God.” The wording that exists would only be used by someone ignorant of the fact that other religious traditions even exist, or deliberately singling out for preference the tradition that uses it. Given how often issues of religious freedom get put up in front of legislators, it’s hard to make the argument that ignorance is the source of the wording. And even if you could make that argument, it still wouldn’t be a good one for keeping the law as-is.

The reference to churches (and only churches, with no mention of synagogues, temples, mosques, lodges, etc.) in the law is another clue to the intent. There is absolutely no need to reference a place for “prayer and meditation” in the law at all. If all you wanted to do was encourage people to pray (or meditate) together or individually, that’s pretty much all you need to say. Referencing only the location of a specific form of religious service implies that it is that form you wish to encourage.

But even if you somehow stretch the bounds of linguistic interpretation to pretend that the wording is inclusive of all religious faiths, it is not inclusive of all religious positions. Specifically, it excludes those whose religious position is “none,” or whose religious faith does not include a god at whom to direct prayers (for example, deists). I have heard it argued that the inclusion of the word “meditation” allays this objection, because meditation can be performed in a nonreligious context. But go look at the wording again. It does not say for people to meditate. It says for them to “turn to God in prayer and meditation.” If you do not have a god to meditate on, this is clearly a ridiculous instruction and very clearly excludes your position.

The National Day of Prayer clearly establishes a state position that a god exists and ought to be prayed to. It strongly implies that the god that exists and ought to be prayed to is the Christian one. That is an establishment of religion. The fact that it’s one that can be freely ignored (and the legal and linguistic contortions that are used to keep it on the books render its clear intent farcical) doesn’t change that one bit.

What Objective Moral Standard?

A recent exchange I witnessed on Facebook between a Christian acquaintance and a nonbeliever was instigated by someone posting a statistic that 93% of Americans base their moral choices on their own opinions and experiences. The Christian was aghast, naturally, because in their opinion people should be basing their choices on [the Christian] God’s moral standard. By the time I actually read the thread there were already over forty comments and it seemed to be winding down, so I didn’t see much point in responding there directly. But it got me thinking, and so we have this blog post.

The argument started from the Christian’s two assertions: 1) that in order to judge the morality of any action you need to have an absolute standard to compare to, and 2) the Christian god is that standard.

The first assertion isn’t true at all. An absolute standard may be a desirable thing. To a certain mindset (and that mindset is not necessarily that of a “good” person, but rather that of a person who is intensely uncomfortable with uncertainty) it may be such a strong desire that it feels like a necessity. But it isn’t. Much like people who know nothing of temperature scales and standards can work out whether one object is cooler or warmer than another, people without an “objective moral standard” can still work out the morality of actions. It’s not a perfect metaphor since morality is significantly more complicated, but it’ll do for my purposes right now.

But as much as I may disagree with the first assertion, at least I can understand it. It’s really the second assertion that I found the more problematic, because to me it doesn’t mean anything. Firstly, it rests on the assumption that the god being referenced even exists. And that assumption is one that I, obviously, don’t believe is warranted. But even more than that, if you grant the assumption, what does it even mean to say “God is the moral standard?”

Does this mean that the rules that God set out for us represent the standard of morality? For this, I’ll reference back to the Facebook discussion. As the nonbeliever pointed out, many of the Old Testament laws deeply violate any modern sense of morality – including that of many Christians. The example he specifically brought up was slavery, which is explicitly permitted under the Old Testament laws. The Christian’s defense here was essentially that those laws were written for a collection of slave-owning Semitic tribes traveling into Canaan, and since those people owned slaves it was clearly moral for it to be regulated by laws in that time and place. But those laws are clearly not applicable now because under secular law we’re not allowed to own slaves.

Firstly, if you’re arguing that something that is immoral in this time and culture was moral in a different time and culture, that’s the very definition of relative morality. In no way does that stand in defense of those laws as an absolute standard. Secondly, that tack is basically saying that if we were allowed to own slaves under secular law, then that would be morally fine. And that if we were allowed to own slaves under secular law, it would be perfectly moral to beat them so badly that they are confined to bed for days at a time, to kidnap people from neighboring countries for the purpose of enslaving them, to claim their children as your property as well, and to use your slaves as hostages to extort lifelong slavery out of indentured servants who would otherwise be protected by law. These are all explicitly permitted.

Lastly, the part of the argument that claims that these laws were necessary to regulate slavery because the Jewish tribes were a slave-owning society completely ignores the fact that (if you buy the Bible’s story) they were a society defined by God’s laws to begin with. It’s not like God just found this tribe lying around and decided to start tinkering with them in an effort at slow reform. He plucked them up (out of slavery of their own, incidentally), marched them off into the wilderness, and laid down the law on them. He completely redefined their society in that act, so to pretend as though he couldn’t possibly have told them not to enslave people because that was part of their society is fundamentally dishonest.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find a single verse decrying, much less forbidding, slavery.

That’s just one example, though. God’s law, and the specific marching orders he gave to the tribes of Israel, include many things we consider deeply immoral today. There are orders demanding genocide, the killing of rape victims, compelling rape victims to marry their rapists, the murder of disobedient children; the list goes on and on up to and including human sacrifice (seriously, read Leviticus 27: 28-29). Most people who claim that “God is the absolute standard” would also recognize that many of God’s laws require deeply immoral acts, and so are forced into elaborate justifications for why those repugnant behaviors are no longer actually required.

Even most Christians seem to think fundamentalists are assholes. But the thing that makes fundamentalists so disagreeable is their adherence to God’s explicitly stated moral demands, not their departure from them.

But maybe God’s law isn’t the absolute standard of morality. Maybe it’s “God’s law as interpreted through the lens of our society.” In the above referenced Facebook conversation, the Christian went on to claim that we can decide which of the Old Testament laws are “no longer applicable” (since none of them are actually explicitly disavowed within the Bible itself) through research, reason, and reading the teachings of Christian scholars. You notice that none of these things are direct messages from God. Which means these methods represent substituting human moral reasoning for the explicit commands of God. Yet the Christian in this discussion was insistent that the moral conclusions they reached were still adhering to the absolute standard of God.

So maybe that’s not what is meant by saying “God is the standard,” either. Perhaps we are supposed to see God’s behavior as what we should strive to emulate. Well, the god described in the Bible is cruel, jealous, dishonest, sexist, bloodthirsty, emotionally and physically abusive, a huge fan of punishing children for the acts of their parents, and prone to genocidal temper tantrums. Further, he demands similar behavior from those under his authority and frequently punishes followers for being insufficiently brutal. Yes, there are words promoting the ideas of love and compassion, but the actions belie them on a massive scale. Even his supposed greatest act of love (Jesus dying for our salvation) is a sacrifice that isn’t really a sacrifice, executed for the purpose of “saving” us from an eternal brutalization that God decreed in the first place. “I’ve come to save you from what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me save you!”

If that’s the absolute standard of morality, perhaps it’s only in the same sense that “absolute zero” could be said to be a standard for temperature. The absolute absence of the quality being measured. Although that’s a tad unfair, because it does overlook the fact that there are some good things to be found in there. But the fact that it’s a mix of good and bad only further undermines the idea that it’s an absolute standard.

And finally, if the “God is the standard” phrase refers to a being that we are incapable of understanding anyway, it’s a functionally useless standard.

Basically, every way I look at the phrase, it’s either meaningless, deceptive, or indicative of a fundamentally horrific universe. It seems to be a code phrase to announce allegiance to your religion rather than a belief in a specific collection of moral teachings. In practice, people seem to work out their moral judgments just the way they always have. It’s a long and complicated road, constantly evolving, suffering setbacks and successes, and probably a never-ending pursuit so long as there are humans and human society to debate it. But I honestly think we’re getting better… largely by adopting compassion as the standard.

And while I have been very harshly critical of the Christian god here, I want to make something very clear: I am not equally critical of actual Christians. If you’re a Christian reading this, understand that I am not attacking you. That moral reasoning I mentioned above that has led the mainstream of Christianity to find ways to banish the worst of their god's laws and behaviors from its worldview are, by and large, improvements. Modern mainstream Christianity is morally superior to the god that dogma forces adherents to claim is their standard.

I do, however, think that “God is the standard” is an impediment to moral understanding. That it slows down progress when it comes to figuring out how we really ought to treat each other. Because with it, all moral questions face an additional complication: not only must believers figure out what the right thing to do is, they also have to figure out how to justify it within the context of the moral understandings of a millennia-old slave owning, racist, genocidal, misogynistic culture that somehow got its tribal totem inscribed into a book as the progenitor of all morality. That's a feat of mental gymnastics that has thwarted progress on so many fronts over the centuries, and continues to do so to this day. And it is most certainly not an objective process.

Why Are Atheists so Arrogant?

There is a frequently leveled accusation that atheists are arrogant because we don’t believe there is anything “greater than ourselves.” The mindset apparently takes the position that, in the absence of belief in gods, we must be setting ourselves up as gods. This kind of misses the fact that an atheistic view of the universe is fundamentally different from a theistic view in many ways.

Have you ever gone outside and looked at the sky on a really clear night away from any big cities? You’d see a lot of stars up there. So many that people have been in awe of the sheer number of them since time immemorial, and they have been used as a metaphor for “too many to count,” for as long as humans have been using metaphors. But one of the things we’ve learned from astronomy is that there are more galaxies out there than there are stars visible to the naked eye. And each of those galaxies contains billions of stars. Each of those stars is, in fact, a sun with a solar system pretty much like our own. Now consider the fact that just our one solar system alone is so mind-bogglingly huge that the number of cubic miles it encompasses is impossible to assign intuitive meaning.

You just can’t look at that honestly and conclude that we’re anything but insignificant. Where is the arrogance in accepting that view of the universe?

Or, let’s look at it from another perspective.

What, exactly, do we mean by something “greater,” than ourselves? It’s not as though we’re all that great, really. Sure, we (meaning humans) are the cleverest beings on the planet (that we know of). But so what? Can we really claim that makes us “great?” We choose to see intelligence as a measure of greatness, and gee whiz it just happens to be the trait we’re better at than every other animal. Of course, many animals are faster, stronger, more durable, have better senses… heck, pick any trait you like other than intelligence, and I guarantee you we know of at least one living thing that beats us at it so badly that we might as well not claim to have the ability at all. Heck, some creatures can survive unharmed in the hard vacuum of space! Why can’t we say they’re “greater” than us?

In that sense, we’re not even “greater” than bacteria.

Now, in another sense, it’s pretty easy to see how one might look at the universe and see lots of things that are greater than ourselves. Is not the sum of humanity greater than any one person? Is not the sum of all life on our planet greater than any one species (humans included)? Is not the entire history of that life greater than just what is alive today? Isn’t the entirety of the earth greater than just the life that’s on it? And so on and so on; there are so many things that can be seen as greater than us that the mind boggles just at trying to list them.

The beautiful thing about evolution, by the way, is that it tells us that we are part of these things that are arguably greater than all of us. We may just be one among many, and perhaps even not all that significant a part, but that connection part of the beauty of it all.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t see the arrogance in that. The universe is not a hierarchy of lesser and greater things. A fact-based view of the universe tells us that we’re really an insignificant part of a whole that is so much greater than ourselves that we can’t possibly comprehend it. At least… not yet.

Or are we arrogant if we claim responsibility for our own successes? I don’t see that either. After all, if I accomplish something it is demonstrably evident that I accomplished it. There would be no evidence of some invisible being doing it for me. So my taking credit (or blame) for what I’ve done isn’t arrogance, it’s simply acknowledging what is quite evident to any observer.

But let’s compare that to the worldview of the most frequent levelers of this accusation of atheistic arrogance: Christians. In that world view, we are made in the very image of the all-powerful creator of the universe. He gave us the right to rule the entire world, and we are the most important thing in it. We are so significant that a single decision by a single man and woman fundamentally altered the very nature of the universe. Every natural disaster, for all that it may kill millions of living things and forever alter the landscape of the planet, is intended as a lesson solely for our benefit. God speaks directly to humans, and takes a personal interest in advancing their lives and goals. The omnipotent creator desires our love so badly that he volunteered to suffer and die in the hopes of winning it, and his greatest enemy bends all of his efforts solely to depriving him of our love because it’s the thing that would harm him most.

You’re going to tell me that that’s not arrogant? Humans, in this view, are the most important thing in the entire physical universe. Sure, they’re also evil, hateful, and vile and really ought to despise themselves, but they’re literally the most significant thing in all of God’s creation (with God himself being outside creation, and therefore the only thing that can occupy a higher rung of importance).

And this is part of why I think Christians call us arrogant. Because if you view the world as a hierarchy with God at the top, humans second, and everything else beneath, and think that all that atheists have done is take this view and chop God off the top, then that must leave humans as the most important thing ever. But this fails to understand that this just isn’t how an atheist sees the world. We see ourselves as part of the world, not above it. We didn’t make the universe, and it wasn’t made for our benefit – we’re just struggling to understand it. From an atheist perspective that top-down hierarchy, in which humans could potentially elevate themselves to the status of “most important thing” if we just get rid of the only being above us, does not exist!

At this point I feel compelled to state the standard disclaimer that I am not, and cannot be, speaking for all atheists. After all, the only thing the label “atheist” entails is not believing in gods, and a vast variety of world views can still be found within that broad category. I’m sure there are atheists who are quite arrogant (as such people can be found in pretty much any population of humans you care to name), and atheists who espouse philosophies in which humans really are the most important things in the universe. But I think that I’m not too far off from the mainstream of scientifically literate atheist thought in this matter.

But I do hope that this helps give some perspective on how it can be that atheism is not an inherently arrogant position.

What About that Death Thing?

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: I’m going to die.

Don’t worry (or celebrate, depending); I haven’t just come into some knowledge that my death is imminent, like that I have cancer or a heart condition or something. It’s just a fact that someday, probably far sooner than I would like, I am going to cease to be a going concern among the living.

And so are you. Along with everyone you know and love, and everyone you don’t know or don’t love. With the possible exception of the immortal jellyfish, every living thing comes to its inevitable conclusion eventually. And I suppose even the immortal jellyfish is going to bite the bullet when the sun eventually engulfs the earth, so scratch that exception. Death comes to us all.

So, being an atheist as I am, what do I think will happen then?

For me? Nothing. I (and in this case I’m using “I” to represent my personality, thoughts, ideas, and memories – the sort of stuff people generally consider to be a person) will cease to exist. And that will be kind of a bummer, I suppose, since I’m still rather fond of existing. On the other hand, since I won’t exist, I won’t be bummed at all. In fact, I simply won’t be. Which is kind of a hard concept to fully grasp.

The body I leave behind (which is odd phrasing, since it implies I’ll be going somewhere), I think I would like to have donated to medical science. Just because I won’t be using it anymore doesn’t mean nobody should, and I think it would give me some comfort in my last moments to think that it could still be used to do some good for other people. I’m an organ donor.

Some people (probably fewer than I think) will be genuinely sad when I’m gone, and probably even mourn me for a bit. I have few requests for them; mourning is for the living, not for the dead, and so I ask only that they do so in whatever way is healthiest for them. If that involves solemn ritual or dressing my corpse up in a clown costume for a night on the town, I really don’t care so long as it helps them.

Others will make appropriately sad noises and gestures of support, without really feeling all that much for my passing. And that’s ok, too. Nobody, really, owes it to me to be torn up over my death, and I wouldn’t want anyone trying to make themselves sad on my behalf out of some sense of obligation.

Of course, the vast majority of people in the world won’t know or care that I’ve died, just as they don’t know or care that I’ve lived. And within a single brief generation, that number will include everyone alive, because everyone who knew and loved me will also be dead.

Does that sound sad? It may surprise you to learn that I don’t think it does. Getting into the why’s and wherefores of that could be its own blog post altogether.

What will it mean for you? Well, for one thing it pretty much guarantees this blog will be over with (assuming it hasn’t ended long before I reach that point). And if you knew me, here’s an implication about my death that you should grasp: you will never see me again. Never. We won’t be hanging out in some “better place” for all eternity, nor will you have the opportunity to watch me tortured by demons for that timeframe either (you know, just in case you’re thinking that’s where I’m headed). We won’t even be trading jokes on the rack in between tightenings of the screws (just in case you happen to think you’re going there too). This time, now, while I’m alive and you’re alive, is the only time we will ever get to spend together.

But that’s kind of what makes this time special. We have only this all-to-brief a time to laugh and to cry, to hold each other or to hold each other at bay, to figure out what’s important to us or not, and to do it or not. We have only this brief time to make the world better, or to make it worse (or to make no impact at all). We have only this brief time in which to live.

It’s so easy to let that time slip by. I’m pretty great at it, myself. Partly because the idea that we’re going to end someday really is hard to fully accept. But I’m trying to get better. Trying to figure out what’s really important to me, and how I can make the world a little better for my having been here. I hope I have the time, and that I can use it wisely.

But if I don’t… if I end without having figured it out… don’t be sad for me. Because even my mistakes will be something you can learn from, and maybe you can leave the world a little better on my behalf.

Why Isn’t Criticizing Your Religious Beliefs Persecution?

You can hardly go a week these days without some sort of dustup over religious issues making the news. Whether it’s that duck guy making homophobic comments, or some high school coach getting reprimanded for making his players pray, or some public official putting up a Ten Commandments monument at the county courthouse, or state legislatures going out of their way to give legal encouragement to discrimination against homosexuals, these issues come up in a steady drumbeat. And whenever society, or the law, moves away from what evangelical fundamentalists want, or criticizes the fundamentalist position, religious leaders seem to love to scream “persecution!”

But that’s not what it is.

You see, on a certain level religions are collections of ideas. They tend to be collections gathered together under a single label and assigned a supernatural source, but basically they’re just ideas. Some of the ideas are good, and some of them are bad. And when someone evaluates one of the ideas contained in your religion, and decides it’s a bad idea and ought to be prevented from being put into general practice among people who don’t share the belief, that doesn’t mean they’re persecuting you. It just means that they don’t consider some ideas to have some special claim to immunity from evaluation simply because they’re religious.

If I think, for example, that persecuting homosexuals is a bad idea, I don’t particularly care if the reason you do it is because gay makes you feel icky, or because you have the ignorant notion that everybody will otherwise turn gay and doom the species, or because your religion tells you to. Going out of your way to make other people miserable when they’re not doing anything that actually hurts anyone is just a bad idea. I will oppose it; not because I’m opposed to religious people, but because I’m opposed to persecuting people.

Likewise, I regard treating other people with kindness and respect as a good idea. If your religion tells you to do that, you won’t find me opposing you in the exercise of that idea. Because whether you believe your god of choice wants you to do it, or because you just happen to share empathy with your fellow human beings, treating others well is kind of a good idea.

There are many examples I could give. I think demonizing sex and sex education, opposing science education, putting the government in the bedrooms of consenting adults, slavery, using government authority to pressure people into accepting a particular religion, and teaching people that they are inherently vile are all bad ideas. I think generosity, kindness, promoting education, and promoting community are all good ideas. All of those have been put forward by some religious denomination or another in recent memory, and I really don’t care: each idea is good or it’s bad based on its own merits, not whether it came out of a religion.

I see real problems with the practice of packaging vast swaths of ideas together and treating them like a monolithic whole. It creates a situation where two people can agree on 99% of their values, but become wholly incapable of discussing the 1% where they disagree without each feeling like the other is attacking their entire world view. There’s no logical connection between “love thy neighbor,” and “evolution doesn’t happen.” But because both those ideas got packaged into the same religion, you have people honestly making the argument that people who don’t believe the former somehow can’t follow the latter either because they’re immoral. The religion creates an artificial and divisive link between the ideas.

I understand, really, that if you accept a religion then it’s hard to see criticism of a particular idea that it espouses as not being an attack on the religion itself. Most religions seem to encourage that view. But those of us on the outside, we really don’t see it that way. We see the individual ideas, and believe they ought to stand or fall on their own. Many antireligious arguments are aimed at getting people to see past the artificial linking of those ideas, so that the ones we see as harmful can cease to be propped up by the ones we see as beneficial.

This isn’t done to persecute religious believers. It’s done because in a society based on religious freedom, an idea that is propped up only by a particular religion cannot be forced on those in society who do not share that religion.

Why Are There Still Monkeys?

It seems almost inevitable that in any debate over evolution versus creation, some creationist will trot out the old chestnut “If we’re evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” In fact, in the wake of the recent Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, the very next day there were commentators throwing out this very question. It’s almost always presented, not as a genuine request for explanation, but with the smug delivery of someone who thinks they’ve come up with the sort of unanswerable conundrum that represents ironclad proof that their opponent cannot possibly be right.

It’s a painful question for people who accept evolution to hear. Not because there’s no answer – in fact, the bulk of this article will be devoted to answering that question. No, it’s painful because of the startling ignorance it displays. If you can ask this question, and especially if you can ask it with that condescending confidence that it somehow disproves evolution, then you need to accept one simple fact: you do not understand the Theory of Evolution well enough to have a position on its plausibility.

Let’s see if we can correct that, at least on this particular part of the puzzle.

First of all, evolution (and here I’m going to use “evolution” as a shorthand for the Theory of Evolution), does not say that our ancestors were any currently existing species of monkey. It says that at some distant remove in the past, we shared a common ancestor with modern monkeys. Now if you looked at that ancestor you’d probably call it a monkey, but it would not be a chimpanzee or a macaque or a capuchin, or an orangutan or any other species we see currently running around the planet. Remember, after all, that “monkey” is a broad category covering many different species.

So what happened to this ancient monkey that we and all those other monkey species can be descended from it? Well, let me give you the broad strokes.

Picture, if you will, that ancient ancestor (we’ll call her Mona the Monkey) as part of a band of monkeys happily living in their trees millions of years ago. Maybe that band gets too big for the local environment and part of it splits off to find food elsewhere. Or there’s some sort of local disaster (a flood,  fire, earthquake, whatever) that splits the band. Whatever it is, some of that monkey’s children end up living and reproducing separately from the others.

So now we have Band A, the original, and Band B, the group that split off. Band A is still living in the same place doing the same things, so it doesn’t really change much. Band B, however, ends up in a place where the trees are more sparse, making it harder to move between them and forcing the monkeys to spend more time on the ground. That means that in Band B, the monkeys who are able to move better on the ground are more likely to survive and pass the traits that let them do so on to their offspring.

Before too many generations pass, the monkeys in Band B have noticeably longer legs than those in Band A simply due to the fact that the longer-legged monkeys in Band B are more likely to survive in the environment where they live.

Now, say a member of Band B is born with a mutation that increases the amount of muscle mass it puts on as it grows. This makes it better at protecting itself from predators in a physical confrontation, which enables it to spend even more time on the ground. And here’s the important thing: only those members of Band B who are descended from the money with that mutation will carry it themselves. That means that so long as Band B and Band A remain separate, no member of Band A will ever have that mutation.

You following me so far? We now have two bands of monkeys. Band A still strongly resembles Mona the Monkey and are a group of small, agile tree-dwellers. Band B, though, is composed largely of monkeys who, because of a combination of their environment selecting for taller monkeys with longer legs, and a beneficial mutation (yes, they happen) that increases their strength, are now larger and more comfortable on the ground. Both groups are descended from Mona the Monkey. But you notice what didn’t happen to Band A? It didn’t die out. It also didn’t change in the same way Band B did.

In other words, Band B is descended from Band A, yet Band A still exists.

The only difference between the story of the monkey bands I just told and the relationship between us and monkeys is one of scale. The band of monkeys that would eventually become us split off millions of years ago from the band that would go on to become modern monkeys, and both bands have split and/or mutated hundreds if not thousands of times in the intervening millennia. Some of those bands died, some of them survived, some even recombined at a later date. The details vary, but it’s always the same basic story repeated over and over and over. That’s what makes it so elegant – that by these simple steps repeated often enough over enough time you can arrive at such a diverse explosion of living forms.

That is why we can be descended from monkeys, and yet there are still monkeys.

Or, to steal a saying I’ve heard and found amusingly appropriate: the reason that we can be descended from monkeys, and yet there are still monkeys, is exactly the same reason most American can be descended from Europeans, and yet there are still Europeans.

This is, of course, only the most basic sort of layman’s explanation. I’m not a biologist, after all, nor are the people I’m targeting by writing this. I just hope this shows people that there is an answer to this question, and that it’s not so far-fetched as you might have been led to believe. And if this little glimpse has at all piqued your interest in what the Theory of Evolution actually has to say, I hope that you will pursue further reading on the subject from material written by actual evolutionary biologists.