"Angry" Atheists and an Implausible God

The Big Fella.
Watching the game.  Snacking on cherubs.

This post may be a departure from earlier ones in some ways.  Even though it may still deal with some of the themes that I have been interested in exploring (because let's face it, thinking about thinking is a broad theme...), it may be a bit more personal.  And it may diverge from the focus on the process of thinking and perception into more of a series of anecdotes about things I have thought or experienced.  But the reason I want to write this has to do with many of the same reasons I have wanted to explore the whole mind thing.  Sooner or later if we start thinking about thinking we end up thinking about our place in the universe.  That is because one of the first things that comes up in the mental conversation about thought is identity.  The in-here and the out-there.  And as soon as you contemplate the out-there, you are just two mailboxes down from wondering about the nature of the universe.  You know, God's house.  Or the house God would live in if he hadn't picked up and moved.  Or never existed.  Or whatever.

I am an atheist.  I have always been an atheist.  I was not raised in a particularly religious home and I did not go to church.  I have never been baptized.

I was welcome to go to church.  I would have been taken to any church I wanted to attend if it was important to me.  I was never a fan of mornings and wasn't sure there was any force in existence that would be powerful enough to make me want to leave the house on a Sunday morning.  My sister, however, did go to church.  She went with friends.  She did not get grief from anyone in the family about doing this.  I say this to dispel any belief that I was actually raised in some sort of atheist cult.  My home was neither a God-fearing home nor a God hating home.  My mother went to church when she was growing up and she was not and is not an atheist.  It was an open minded home.  Now, no one -- no matter how smart or sophisticated -- can be perfectly open minded at all times, but the general values I was raised with were love and respect and open mindedness (and politeness, which is an important and often undervalued form of respect).

As a child, I didn't have God taught to me.  At least not unless I asked questions.  And the answers I received when I did ask were always bewildering.  Even as a six year old, God made no sense.

Father Christmas.
Note the similarity...

I had been told by my brother when I was five that there was no Santa Clause, but by the age of six or seven I looked out over my neighborhood at all the rooftops and wondered how I could ever be so stupid to think anyone could visit all those houses in one night.  Not just those houses, of course.  That seemed marginally doable.  But all the houses in all the neighborhoods in all the states and countries all over the globe.  It seemed so obvious I couldn't understand how I had never questioned it.

And God felt pretty much the same way.  To be in the minds of every single person at every single moment for all of history seemed like a task no one had ever really thought through.  I could imagine a God that was sort of a telephone operator, switching from call to call.  But then you would just have the rooftop problem all over again.  If I was waiting for God to be on my line, I'd be waiting a long time.  Even as a child I appreciated big numbers and although I had no idea how many people were on the planet, I knew it was more than the number of rooftops Santa would have to visit.

The notion that God was everywhere might have taken some time to work through.  And I possibly could have done it, except each new piece of evidence I received about God and his works made less and less sense.

While most of the animals are lining up to
board the Ark, that lion in the lower
left has to think this looks more like
an Appleby's.

The science of Noah's ark was insufficient by the time I was in second grade.  There was simply no way that two of every animal could fit on a boat nor could they all survive even if they did.  And what of the ants?  You have two ants on a boat and in a few days you have two dead ants.  I knew ants needed more than two members to survive, and I suspected that many other animals did too.  Did ants not count?  Surely they were animals.  They weren't plants!*  And what of the wasps and beetles and slugs and spiders?  It seemed untenable to collect so many creatures in time to save them from a flood much less feed and house them on a boat for 6 weeks. (It was actually over a year in the story, but I considered only the 40 days of the storm.)

*Please note this is not a refutation of the Biblical account of Noah.  It is merely what I was thinking about when I was seven.  (Of course the ants and worms and spiders were not on the ark.  That would be silly!)

As I grew older I felt my initial suspicions were confirmed.  As convenient as the male-female pairing is for a fable about animal husbandry, it would not be practical for many animals which are prone to living in larger groups.  Wolves are pack animals.  Some animals are solitary except for brief periods of mating.  No, the more I learned about it, the more the story of the ark sounded like a parable.  And some Christians do believe that the Bible is a book of stories, but I lived in the Northern edge of the Bible belt, and I was told by my classmates what they had been told by their parents and pastors -- that the Bible was literally true.

Perhaps if I had been exposed to a more sensible treatment of the Bible -- such as the ones I have heard quite often as an adult from people who consider themselves Christian -- I would have had a different impression of God and religion.  But faced with the choice of either accepting the dubious tales as true or rejecting them as false, I could choose no other path.  By the second grade I was telling my classmates I was an atheist.  That I did not believe in God.

I was told that I was wrong and that God did exist and I was going to Hell.  I specifically remember engaging my 7 and 8 year old friends in theological debates (though I did not know to call them that of course).  "You say God made all of us.  Well then he must have made me.  And if he made me to be who I am, then he must have made me an Atheist."

Dear ole Dad

One child came up to me and told me he had checked with his father.  "He says you were made by the Devil."

Ponder that for a moment.  Telling your child that he attends Bennet Elementary School in Manassas Virginia with the spawn of Satan.  I wonder how that person is doing now, forty years later.

It is worth making clear that I did not often wear my atheism as a badge of honor.  I was certainly not ashamed of it, but I also knew it created problems for me socially.  There were surely times it was not appropriate to bring it up.  I don't remember ever challenging a religious adult until I was much older.  This was not because I was afraid that they would convince me I was wrong, but quite the opposite.  It would be rude.  I would not have wanted to embarrass them by making them defend their beliefs.  People challenged me to defend my beliefs all the time.  And they didn't shake my beliefs, but they did teach me something about impolite behavior.  Remember that respect was a core belief of mine.  It had been instilled in me not out of a fear of God but simply because it was the decent thing to do.  The Golden Rule -- treating others as you would wish to be treated -- was something I could endorse.  But I lived by it because it made sense, not because it had any relation to reward or punishment.  (To be clear, I can be a prick as much as anyone else.  I'm certainly not claiming to have cornered the market on tolerance and politeness.  But when I am a jerk, I am usually not proud of it.  I am simply the kind of person who would rather be stilted and polite than natural and laid back at the risk of offending someone.  I'm comfortable in my own skin, but I don't think the rest of the world needs to know what I think of them all the time.)

But the point I want to make here is that by growing up an atheist I was not being trendy or cool or trying to get attention or defying the world to prove something to me.  I was simply responding with my appraisal of what felt true.  As a child my confidence in my own ability to learn the truth was outweighed only by my naiveté in thinking that all people shared the same goal.  I really thought that all anyone wanted was to get it right no matter what the truth turned out to be.  This belief was slow to erode.  But over time I have met plenty of people -- even "deep thinkers" -- who have a vested interest in what they have decided is the truth, and they have no interest in pursuing the matter further, thank you very much.

The power of the mind...
(for illustration purposes only)

This is an important point that is worth a small pause.  I do believe in the power of the mind to discover what is true.  I always have and probably always will.  One of the reasons this blog experiment interests me so much (and why I am also fascinated by conspiracy theories) is that I have an unshakable faith in the ability of honest thought to dispel bullshit and shine a light on the truth.  (For anyone who realized I just confessed a "faith" -- albeit a faith in reason -- that is not an accident and will be a topic for another day.)

I know some things are unknowable. (This is something not all rationalists realize.)  But I don't fear the limits of the mind any more than I fear what it can discover when focused on a task with a clear and open mind.  Maybe this is folly.  But it has always been part of my genetic makeup to trust in the power of thought.  I enjoy discovery even when it means my previous ideas (and ideals) are wrong or at least less right than I had thought.

My trust in the mind is so deep that if I were to discover God on my path of introspection and philosophy, I would not reject the idea.  I do not disbelieve God because I am afraid of the possibility of God, nor do I have such a vested interest in a universe that lacks a God that I would be willing to delude myself into rejecting that important discovery if and when the time came.

This all sounds very self centered and egotistical, as biographic ramblings often do, but the point is an important one to me.  My disbelief in God comes from not believing in "Him" (or "it" or whatever), not from any desire not to find God.  I do not cast God aside.  I do not reject him.  I simply do not buy the concept.  That is a critical distinction which many atheists will appreciate, since we are used to being accused of having some kind of anti-God chip on our shoulder or an inability to look at religion with an open mind (as if that is all it would take to buy in).

The Anti-theists

Some folks truly do harbor hostility toward the notion of God.  I am not one of them.  But for whatever reason, and there are many, some folks can't stand that others believe in God.  Some of these folks have suffered at the hands of others who claimed a belief in God, who preached kindness and tolerance while practicing cruelty and exclusion.  And others may have different reasons to feel hostile.

The original Doubting Thomas,
Saint Thomas the Apostle,
making sure it wasn't done with mirrors.

Many anti-theists I have known were raised religiously and in fact convert back to religion later in life.  That's not a judgement, that's just an observation.  It is a normal part of religious discovery for some folks to reject their childhood teachings only to later return to them with a more refined and reasonably nuanced perspective.  Of course some people go all in and end up becoming Born Again Christians.  Again, I am not trying to judge the life paths of others.  But I suspect these people became atheists or anti-theists out of a sense of spiritual deficit more than an honest rejection of religion for rational reasons.  This is to say some folks are hungrily questing for order and purpose in their lives and when they do not find it in religion, sometimes they seek it through "lack of religion".  Often these particular atheists end up coming back into the fold.  It is hard (perhaps impossible) to find a lasting sense of meaning through reason alone.  (There's an atheist somewhere howling at this assertion, but I will try to defend it at a later date.)  The exhausting business of the pursuit of meaning using only reason can understandably send some folks retreating to a more comfortable mental framework.  Or maybe even discovering that there is more to life than reason alone.  It's possible.

Again, I should try to make clear, the reason I talk about different kinds of atheists and how some are merely temporary, is because I do not care much about the cause of atheism per se.  I only care about the quest for truth.  And only a bigot thinks that all others must share his truth.  That is both the source of many atheists' anger -- being told by others that they must fall in line -- and the cause of the mistreatment some atheists visit upon religious folks.  (Religious folks are frequently hostile to atheists as well, but that really should be expected given the nature of their worldview.  I've always thought proponents of reason and open mindedness should exhibit behavior which is, well, more reasonable and open minded.  It should be no surprise that the proponents of dogma and unquestioning obedience do not display civility.  That should not be an excuse for reasonable people to behave unreasonably.)

I usually have no need to call anyone an idiot.  (Though late night on the internet it can be very hard to restrain oneself.  And let's face it, if there are some people who are amazingly bright it is a statistical fact that others must be colossally stupid.)  As someone who simply has never believed in God, I have had a life's worth of practice being surrounded by those who do not see the world the way I do.  I am no more interested in converting anyone to atheism than I am in being converted by them to whatever silliness allows them to sleep each night.

The Silliness that Allows Us to Sleep

But here is the thing that I think some more militant atheists and certainly many anti-theists fail to fully appreciate.  We all need to sleep.  Whatever our worldview, we all need to find enough peace and order in the world that we can close our eyes and know that we will likely awake in the morning in a world that is very much like the one we went to sleep in.  I am talking, of course, about "meaning".  That should be Meaning with a capital M.  Each of us -- atheist or lamb of god -- is programmed (whether by design or evolution) to seek out a sense of our place in the universe.  It is an unavoidable side effect of self-awareness.   Again, it goes back to the basic questions of our life.  Who am I, where am I, and what am I doing here?

I could go off at length about all the ways that religious fundamentalists have gotten it wrong, and all the injustices they visit upon the world, but frankly, I don't have the time or the interest.  I grade on a curve and the fundamentalists are in the remedial class of rational thought.  I am not interested in their test scores.  Instead, I'd like to focus on what I think are some of the errors of the smarty-pants crowd.  Those who frankly should know better.

Richard Dawkins recently tweeted:

And this, to me, is a complete miss.  It is a demonstration of ignorance by someone who would like us to believe he is intelligent and a "deep thinker".

The explanation for why someone is religious is a simple one.  Even a natural one.  If we're so proud of reason, maybe we should accept that religion evolved as part of our human culture in order to explain that which we had no way of explaining.  It is a kind of cultural appendix: once more necessary than today but in every way a very natural phenomenon which arose through the simple process of (in this case cultural) evolution.

An Aside About the Appendix

Recent science has posited that the appendix is kind of a petri-dish for essential gut bacteria.  In ancient times when we may have had to go without food for days at a time our natural gut flora would starve.  The appendix was a little nursery that ensured when we finally did get to eat, we'd have a supply of bacteria that aided us in our digestion.  In modern times, we don't really have the same incidence of gut bacteria starvation, so the appendix is less critical than it once was.  But the little organ does not simply disappear on the day we no longer need it.  It hangs around, possibly performing secondary functions, being replicated long after it is an essential organ for our survival.

Our lack of need for wisdom teeth would be another example.  Our mouths are shrinking and can often no longer accommodate so many huge teeth which are hardly needed for today's diet.  While many of us have to get ours pulled at the dentist, some of us can still fit them in our mouths, and still others -- a lucky forwardly evolved bunch -- do not grow wisdom teeth at all.

Back to Religion

A cultural evolutionist who believes that ideas and customs function somewhat analogously to genes, Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" back in the 1970's.  Despite my misgivings about the word itself, and some of how it has been bastardized (one could say the meaning of the word meme was itself a victim of cultural evolution), I think it is clear that Dawkins is a man who understands the progress of ideas.   But as such, shouldn't he be the first to admit that if religion came into being in the first place and has been with us so long in the second place, that religion must be a collection of memes that is subject to the same evolutionary forces as any other ideas?  So it would not be a stretch to say that the mutation of religion arose and served a purpose relevant to the survival of the species.

Basic evolutionary science requires that we accept that ideas and customs which serve no purpose or which are in fact harmful to our ability to reproduce and prosper  will die out.  The Shakers were strict believers in celibacy.  They went from a peak of 6000 members down to just three today.  Evolution takes care of some ideas more quickly than others.   Is Dawkins forgetting that religion is just a part of the cultural evolution he espouses?  Does he think he can nudge cultural evolution along through ridicule?

Religion is a broad concept serving many purposes.  If some or all of these purposes are outmoded they will inevitably be replaced by concepts which better promote human survival.  But this process will take time.  Telling someone, in essence, they have no defense for being religious is over simplifying the matter in a way unbecoming to a scientist.  Richard Dawkins' tweet has all the intellectual sophistication of a dentist yelling at his patient for still sprouting wisdom teeth.

What is truly problematic is that it belies a hostility that I think is not necessary and certainly not helpful to the progress of cultural evolution.  When I stated earlier that I do not care about converting others to my beliefs, this is partially why.  I see religion as a natural response of a primitive culture to the vagaries of the environment.  And as a "big picture" kind of person, I readily accept that we are still a very primitive people.  We are barely (if at all) qualified to call ourselves intelligent in any real sense of that word.  Again, this is from having spent a life listening to others talk about how they believe the world works.  The refrain, "How can you be so stupid?" may ring out from time to time in my inner mind, but it is rarely productive or becoming to allow it to pass one's lips.   I don't know of any times the sentiment actually convinced the listener to re-examine his assumptions.

Straight-lace Pimpin'

In point of fact, if reason is sufficient to meet the needs of humanity, than it will win the day by being reasonable.  It will not win over the world by bullying.

There is no doubt that proponents of religion promote things which are anathema to reason.  But the target of the debate should be about the harmful products of religion, not religious people themselves.  In 1990's parlance, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game."

Can You Choose What To Believe?

There is another question that is brought up by Mr. Dawkins inelegant tweet as well.  Can we really choose what we believe?    What if I told you the President of the United States was really an alien lizard man who was using his shapeshifting technology to appear human?  Would you believe it?   Could you choose to believe it if you wanted to?  Or would you be stuck holding your current belief unless I convinced you?

But here is the thing.  Could I convince you?  If I asked you to have an open mind about the possibility that the President was an alien lizard man, would you honestly be open to evidence?  How indisputable would my evidence have to be before you were convinced?  Indeed given the inability of most of us to accept all the changes in our world views that would be required for such a thing to be true, could you even believe it if you saw it with your own eyes?

Now on the other hand, what if I told you that the President was actually born a day earlier than he claimed to be?  I could explain that there was some confusion in the hospital and his delivery was actually several hours earlier than had been recorded.  Would you believe that?  Could you "choose to" believe it, or would it take some evidence?

In all likelihood the degree of evidence I would need to present would be a great deal less to prove that the President was a day older than he claimed than it would be to prove he was a lizard man alien.  And you'd examine the evidence I did provide much less skeptically.  In fact, you would probably view my documentation with an open mind that readily accepted such a thing was possible.  Are you choosing which thing you believe to be more likely, or is it just a product of all your experiences and what you already believe about the way the world works?

Mmmmmm... Dogma

Belief is not like something we get out of a vending machine.  We can't simply select those beliefs we want, push a button labelled "Truth", and have them dispensed to us in stay fresh packaging.  No, our beliefs are quite complicated.  And they are often in conflict.  Sometimes people who don't really think praying does any good will pray anyway.  In times of great anguish and feelings of overwhelming helplessness, the rational reasons not to pray are overcome by the hope that it might possibly do some good -- especially if the custom was common when they were growing up.  Likewise some people who have always believed in a caring God will get vexed when they experience something -- usually a great personal loss -- that they did not see coming and feel has no possible justification in a world that is good.  One purpose of religion, rightly or wrongly, is to help such a person maintain a sense or order and purpose in life even in the face of such incongruous tragedy.  Usually the "explanation" is that larger forces are at work.  (The ole "Must be part of God's Plan" conspiracy theory.)  Our human reactions to human experiences are not candy dispensed from a machine.  They are complicated and multivariate processes.   Blaming someone for what they "choose to believe" is a very silly notion when you get right down to it.

Richard Dawkins again:

This merits a short discussion here, because it is the obvious answer to much of what I have been saying here.  The possibility of a lizard man President is simply a matter for evidence.  Similarly if there is no evidence for prayer working then there is no reason to pray -- your own happiness or mental comfort be damned.  The truth is the truth and that is all there is to it.  Or so goes the strict rationalist's credo.

But that is exactly the point.  Truth is not belief.  And belief is not truth.  None of us knows the whole truth of the universe, and we do not have the luxury of waiting until we do before we form our beliefs.  So all of us must build our beliefs around incomplete evidence.  This evidence enters our mind through our existing perceptual screens and is influenced by well known processing errors such as confirmation bias (where evidence that confirms our beliefs is given more weight than evidence which might challenge them).   This is why it would be hard to convince anyone without the mental discipline of a Vulcan that the President is a lizard man alien.  The evidence would have to be overwhelming to get us to change all our assumptions.  Yet we'd like to believe we are open minded and rational.

And the very reason I chose such a ridiculous example is that it does sound ridiculous to us.  There is no evidence we have ever encountered in our daily lives that would make this situation sound even remotely possible.  Yet our duty as rational people requires us to keep an open mind.  But evolution is not on our side here.  There is an actual survival benefit to discounting the mental effort required to allow for extremely unlikely events.  So no matter how open minded we wish to be, and no matter how much we focus on the skill, pre-conception is programmed into our brains for its time saving, possibly life saving, benefits.  The number of times that the ability to grasp most of the situation in an instant outweighs the survival benefit of making a more complete and painstaking analysis guarantees that we have been evolved to "jump to conclusions".  Even when we strive to "believe only evidence" there is no guarantee the beliefs we form from the evidence have the intellectual rigor we might expect.

It is all well and good to suggest that all humans should be highly polished reasoning machines, but that is not the case.  In fact, if we are really interested in evidence painting our picture of truth, we must admit that the examples I give above of irrational human behavior (like praying when you don't think you really believe in prayer) are actual evidence of human behavior.  So while we may wish human behavior was more rational or pure, the evidence suggests otherwise.  That may make Richard Dawkins unhappy, but I know his happiness is not his concern.  He only wants the truth.  And the truth is that human beings form their beliefs using irrational components alongside of reason.  We may not think the situation ideal, we may wish it were not true, but evidence does not care about what we wish were true.

So the point is that if the actual truth is something very distant from our own working truth, our ability to make all the necessary mental accommodations to allow the new evidence to take up residence is compromised.

Our Adaptable Minds

We have established that we do not get to choose what we believe, but even this is not the whole truth.  In some contexts, we do seem to have some control.  Or at least we seem to have a great deal of input into how we frame the context that we place information into.  This is how a prisoner serving a long sentence in a dank cell can come to look forward to Fridays because it is "chicken fried steak day".  It is how we can happily accept a $1 tip for some good deed, or a $5 bill slipped into a greeting card when such sums of money may make no difference to us in other contexts -- such as when we are doing our taxes.  Finding that I have $1 more in my bank account than I thought I did is not as interesting to me as finding a $1 bill on the ground.  They both indicate that I was $1 richer than I thought I was (or $1 less poor if you prefer), but only one has the real thrill of found money.  But I could "choose" to look at the bank account error as found money if I wanted to.  I can decide to remind myself that it is really the same as finding a dollar on the ground.

Make anything you want.
But if you're a girl that
better mean a cake.

We can shape the context into which we place information.  In this sense, we may get to swap the lenses through which we view events in sort of the same way the optometrist clicks lenses back and forth when asking us which image is clearer.  When met with bad news, I can decide "I don't have time for this".  When realizing I am about to socialize with someone I don't particularly care for, I can decide to "make the best of it". With some varying degree of success, we can actually control how we think of information we encounter.  But that doesn't necessarily mean we can control what we believe.  For example, could I convince myself that I actually like the tedious person with whom I must exchange pleasantries, or is the limit of my control in deciding how I react to the collision of my beliefs and my circumstances?

Or harken back to the experiments with "intent". The subjects, having been given post-hypnotic suggestions, had no idea why they were leaving the room but unknowingly invented reasons all the same.  This strongly suggests we do not even know the precise reason for our own behavior.  We know what our mind has decided is the reason for our actions, but this explanation does not have any iron clad connection to the truth.

This is easier to see in others' behavior than it is our own.  We have all seen someone do something that they claim was for a reason entirely unrelated to why they did it.  A good friend may tell you the story about how he went back to his ex-girlfriend's apartment to retrieve a copy of a movie he wanted to watch, and that is how he discovered who his ex-girlfriend was now sleeping with.  But as more impartial observers, we can often see the motivation was a pretense.  The movie may have been his excuse for paying a visit -- he may have even convinced himself or believed that he really wanted to see it -- but the real reason for going back to his ex-girlfriend's house was to see what she was up to.

So the question remains, is your buddy lying?  Did he knowingly invent an excuse to drop in on his ex at that particular time?  Maybe.  Or maybe he is simply in denial.  He may actually believe he was motivated by innocent feelings and was subsequently exposed to that horrible new information about what his ex was up to.

Assuming it was the latter, should we be held personally responsible for our own denial?  How can we be, when our conscious mind is picking and choosing among many personal identities and agendas to report to us what we really want and why we are really behaving as we are?  Just because a good friend can easily spot our own deception, should we be blamed for not thinking more clearly?  Out right lying is one thing.  Storming over to her house and pounding on the door and inventing an excuse only after he sees the DVD sitting next to the television is a clear case of failing to take responsibility for his actions.  But does he bare the same responsibility if he had been trying to get through a painful period of his life and his mind was having its own internal dialogue about all the ways he could find himself back over at her house?  A part of him wanted to go over and for them to reconcile.  A part of him knew who she was seeing and knew that this particular night was the most likely time to "catch" him over there.  (I put "catch" in quotes because if they were broken up, there was nothing to get "caught" about.  It was only the ex-boyfriend's lingering jealously that would prompt a word like "catch").  A part of him simply wanted to know if she was as lonely and miserable as he was.

All of these feelings are obvious to the outside observer.  But when you are going through them these feelings are overwhelming, and it is hard to be objective.  This young man may have been using all of his emotional energy to simply get out of bed every morning and keep his job.  Can we fault him for not having the insight to avoid going over to his ex-girlfriend's house when one piece of his mind had offered him a perfectly innocent reason for wanting to do so?

Intention, as we are repeatedly concluding, is a very tricky concept.  We can't even be sure we know why we do what we do, yet for some reason it seems easier to determine what motivates others.  I always think of this as the Monday Morning Quarterback problem.  It is easy, from the outside, with nothing to gain or lose, and usually after the fact, to see how the choices made by others were destined to play out.  This is true whether the action in question is throwing the ball on fourth down or going over to an ex-girlfriend's house without calling first.  But when we are in the midst of the game, when the competition is real and the outcome means the difference between our own success and failure,  these choices are much less cut and dried.  Thousands of possible scenarios and hundreds of competing motivations play into the choices we make repeatedly throughout the day.

A 20th century ritual hammer. 

In this context, we come back to the question of how we can hold others accountable for what they "choose to believe".

For the sake of social order, we may accept that we can insist on people taking responsibility for their actions.  Yet even there we have to carve out an exception for those who have no ability to control themselves or comprehend the results of their actions (the people we call insane).  But if we are to be reasonable people -- and those committed to rational thought are supposed to be the epitome of reason -- then we must recognize that beliefs are not always a choice.  If we expect others to respect us, we must act respectfully.  There are some zealots and bigots and crazies who will never respect reason and rationality.  But that does not give us license to adopt their brutal and primitive behavior.  If anything it should shine a very clear light on why it is we do not act that way.   Hateful bigots and spiteful losers are no more deserving of our hatred and spite than anyone else.   They are the walking poster children for the error of their ways.  Validating their behavior by responding in kind makes no rational sense.  Hate and spite are the enemies.  Giving these people "a taste of their own medicine" is no more logical than using nuclear missiles to blow up the world's nuclear weapons.

The following quote is attributed to Gandhi.  Though this exact usage has not been found in any of his writings, the sentiment is clearly consistent with his beliefs, and Martin Luther King Jr. would also later borrow the concept if not the quote:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

To me this appeal for restraint and respect (and peace) is compelling not for its compassionate tone but for its eminent logic.  Reasonable thinkers can't help but accept the logic that if bad behavior is met with more bad behavior, the cycle of violence and aggression will never end.  To me, the answer to hate speech is not more hate speech.  Nor is it silence.  It is the persistent and rational insistence that clear thinking human beings will not sit idly by while others manifest their hate in destructive ways.

So while I certainly understand the frustration that leads to the kind of tweet Dawkins sent about another person's religious beliefs, I think the better (more effective and more rational) response would be to say that the person has every right to their beliefs but that we rational people are organizing to put an end to the harm those beliefs are causing others.  The adults in the room are speaking now.

Interview with a Special Flower

For this thought experiment we're going to take a special packet of seeds up in a balloon.  These seeds are for a flower -- a special flower -- but we will get back to that later.  We are going to go up in the balloon high over whatever town or city you like to imagine when taking thought piece balloon rides.

When we get to a place over the parking lots and parks, near the river (if your imaginary town has no river, we'll substitute any body of water), we are going to dump out our packet of seeds.  We will plant flowers from the air, casting them to the wind and letting them all fall where they may.  Some will land in the water where they will become soggy and sink.   Some will land on barren rooftops or scorching hot asphalt and dry out and turn to dust.  Some will fall into unfortunate corners of shade with limited sunlight -- too little to support our seeds.  One will fall into a sandbox, so close to nearby soil but alas in an environment too hostile to support the tender seedling as it breaks through it's husk.  But one, one very lucky seed, will fall into a pile of very moist and fertile soil next to a fencepost that happens to give the perfect exposure of sun with some protective shade during the hottest part of the day.  There are actually a few seeds that happen to fall in pretty good locations, but this spot in particular seems very likely to work out for our young seedling.  We're pretty sure its going to do just fine.  So we'll come back when it blossoms.

Now I said this was a special flower, and I meant it, because when this flower blossoms, it develops consciousness and the ability to communicate with us.  So now we are going to visit our flower and ask it a few questions.

Interviewer:  Who are you?
Flower:  I am a flower.  Who are you?

I:  This is not about me.  I am trying to learn about you and how you see your world.  Are there others like you?
F:  You mean other flowers?  Yes, of course.

I:  No I mean flowers who are conscious and can communicate.
F:  Oh, no.  I am the only one.

I:  Are you sure about that?
F:  Yes, I am sure.  I have seen no other flowers like me, so I believe I am the only conscious flower in existence.

I:  But how can you say that if you haven't been everywhere?
F:  I get your point.  But think about it.  I happen to be in the perfect place.  The space around me is very hostile.  I just can't imagine any other flowers like me surviving even in the unlikely event that I was not the only one in the world.

I:  Let's move on.  Why do you think you are in the perfect place?
F:  Well think about it.  A flower like me can not just grow anywhere.  I need the right mix of sun and rain.  This spot is just wonderful.

I:   I mean, why do you think you exist?
F: I am pretty sure I was planted right here in this very spot because someone wanted me to grow.   I could have been planted anywhere, but I was planted right here.  It is obvious that someone cared about me a great deal and took great pains to make sure that I lived long enough to blossom.

I:  Do you think maybe you could have just been planted by accident?
F:  Not a chance.  You don't get it.   I have consciousness.  I can tell this is something very special.  Something as special as this can't happen by accident.  And anyway, if I was planted by accident, why is the world around me so perfect to support my life?  No, I am sure that this is part of a plan.  I would not have survived if it were not.

I:  Do you think about whoever planted you?
F:   Oh yes, every day.  I thank the Gardener for his infinite wisdom in picking this very perfect spot for me and watching over me making certain that I would grow and blossom.

I:  You think the Gardener watched over you during your early life?
F:  Of course.  Early life, mid-life, the whole thing.  Are you daft?  I have already said that the odds that I would be here at all seem very tiny.  So it certainly must be the Gardener's Plan.  And he wouldn't bother having a Plan if He didn't make sure He saw it through.  I am living proof that the Gardener wanted me here and He watches over me protecting me from harm.

The Gardener doing His thing.

I:  You seem pretty convinced.  Is there any way you could imagine that you were simply a random seed that fell from the sky and you happened to fall in the right place?  Is it possible that other seeds in worse places did not live or maybe that there are even other seeds in other places that managed to live long enough to blossom and that maybe you will communicate with them someday?
F:  Yes, if I think about it hard enough, I can imagine this possibility, but it doesn't feel true.  I have no reason to believe that I am not the only flower of my kind.  I feel like I am special somehow.  And why would the Gardener do that?  What use would he have for other flowers like me anyway?  I can see how you could make some sort of fantasy where this is all happening just by chance, but I wouldn't want to live in a world like that.  It would mean I am not special.  It would mean, in fact, that I am meaningless.  I am not meaningless.  I am special.  Therefore I know I am right.

I:  Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
F:  You're very welcome.  I am always glad to have an opportunity to praise the Gardener and share my thanks for His precious gift of life.

Are We Just Making Fun of the Flower?

In "speaking" with this flower, it becomes obvious the message this thought experiment was created to deliver.  But is this just an artificial construct designed to make an argument easy to refute?  Are we just poking fun at a straw man flower?

Quite the contrary, I think the story is instructive and useful.  Yes, we start with the knowledge that this particular flower is the result of a random, haphazard, and disinterested act.  We have no such proof that human beings arose through the same process.  But that's not the point.  The point is that the flower has every reason to believe what he is saying.   From its perspective, every conclusion about its life seems, if not strictly logical, at least reasonable.  Why would he have any reason to believe that the rare event that is his existence was not a very controlled and intentional act of a powerful being looking over and watching out for him?

So all this is meant to suggest is that if you start with the assumption that humanity arose from the random distribution of elements that could under the right circumstances give rise to conscious life, what would our own conclusions and thoughts about this process be?   We should be forgiven for assuming we are special -- all evidence around us through our development supports that idea.  And we should be forgiven for rejecting the idea that our existence has no meaning.  Our minds are predisposed to seek meaning.  This may be another developmental accident or it may be an essential part of consciousness.  Regardless, human minds view the world with a need to order and derive meaning.  That is how we learn.  And if we assign meaning to events around us (which gives us the revelation of causality and allows us to develop science) then why wouldn't we turn that lens inward and seek to interpret the meaning of our own existence.  It would be surprising and out of character if we could make causal and meaningful connections in the world around us but assumed that we ourselves had no role to play in the universe.  Quite the opposite, we have every right to approach our own lives as something meaningful.  And assuming that we are the random result of a scattering of cosmic seeds does not do that, at least not without a great deal of further intellectual development.

So the point in the rather obvious play was to show that the flower is not just some stupid plant, but rather it has drawn perfectly reasonable conclusions about the world around it based on what it knows and can infer.  We have the benefit of knowing how far off base the flower is in this example, but we should still be able to trace the logic involved.

The reason I like this thought piece is that I have sometimes heard that the universal existence of God as a concept lends some sort of support for why God "must" exist.  But here we can see that there is another way we can support the idea of God absent God's existence.

Let's examine this from a different angle.

There Either is a God or There isn't.

Let's start with the notion that God exists.  We would still have a number of determinations to make.  For example is this God anything like what we think of when we think of God.  Is there just one God?  Is the God that exists closer to the Christian God, the Jewish God, the Islamic God, or any other type of God, etc.  But let's set that aside for now.  Let's assume that God exists and He possesses most of the qualities common to all the most popular religions.  That is to say, he created man, he is involved in the daily life of human beings, etc.  (similar to what the flower thought of when it said "Gardener".)

If this is the case, then the things we (as humans) have written about God and the way he is described can be easily explained as coming from our experiences living in the world God has designed.  If God is real and involved in our daily lives, it stands to reason that we would collectively over time have enough "brushes with God" that we felt there was some evidence for His existence.  The differences in our perception of God could be explained by our having slightly different interpretations of the evidence.  They could also be explained (and have been) as the result of Satan (or the force of evil and ignorance) who has led others astray so that they don't worship the "true" God.  I'm going to put aside these loaded questions right now and simply accept that one reason for believing in God may be that He exists.

But let's look at the other side of this, as demonstrated by our little thought piece.  Could we believe in God if He did not exist?  That is to say, without God, would there be any inclination on our part to create him to explain the world the way we experienced it?  And I think the answer is clearly yes.

Consciousness is not All Seeing

In order to do any of the wonderful high level functions our minds accomplish, we need first to develop consciousness.  This is the knowledge that we exist.  By definition this requires an "in here" and an "out there".  It is the awareness that there is a "Universe" and "I" am a part of it.  We could not wonder who created the Universe or who created ourselves if we did not conceive of these things as entities to begin with.  So the great leap of mental development that is self-awareness or consciousness (which clearly warrants much more consideration in due time) is a pre-requisite for inquiring about the existence of God.  But we should not make the error of thinking that self-awareness comes with complete knowledge of the Universe or even ourselves.   It is one thing to be aware of something, it is another still to know everything there is to know.  This might seem obvious, but it is an important point in the development of our case for the belief in God.

Short of total knowledge about something, we seek to infer knowledge based on evidence.  This is a perfectly legitimate and useful logical tool.  And it has a survival value as well.  If we learn that a particular piece of fruit is poisonous, we infer that other fruits of the same kind are also poisonous.  It may seem obvious to the point of ridiculousness, but it is actually an amazing product of logical thought.  The true experiential way to knowledge is to accept things as fact only when they have been proven through contact and experience.  A mind without the power of logical inference would not accept that a particular piece fruit was poisonous unless it was tasted and found to be disagreeable.  This would apply whether we had tasted two fruits of the same kind already or two thousand.  No, it is a logical leap to conclude that IF this fruit is poisonous, THEN another fruit of this type is also poisonous.  In logical parlance that would translate to:


     A and B are both members of the set F.
     If A=B, then
     If  A implies P then B implies P.


Or, in English, if A and B are both certain types of fruit, then if A is poisonous, B is also poisonous.

This can seem very scholarly when broken into logical rules or very basic to the point of obviousness if treated with a real world example.  But the fact remains, concluding that a fruit you have never tasted is poisonous simply because it looks and smells like another fruit that you know is poisonous is a logical leap with huge implications for the advancement of all creatures who can handle the concept.

What Can You Infer from a Sample of One?

I snuck something into that example that made it seem more simple than it was.  I said that the second, untasted, fruit was "the same" as the poisonous one.  How would we know what made it the same?  In practice, unless you have an identical copy of your first experience (or piece of fruit) it takes more than one experiment to determine when two things share enough in common to belong to the same class.  Look at these three fruits:

If you just had the fruit and not the plant, could you tell them apart?  One of them is perfectly edible.  Which one can you imagine eating?

It turns out that the top one is a very edible Huckleberry.  The next one is the fruit of the Asparagus plant, which is moderately poisonous, and the last one is the Flax Leaved Daphne, which is poisonous and potentially fatal.  How many trials would it take to be able to tell the difference?

The point is that logical inference doesn't work very well unless we have enough examples (or data) to make comparisons.  So now let's think back to our special flower.

When it was trying to determine its place in the universe -- how rare it might be or whether it was indeed unique -- it didn't have a lot to go on.  It had its local space and that was it.  It observed no other special flowers besides itself.  Everything it could say about itself was based on a sample of one.

Additionally when it examined the environment around itself, it saw many places too hostile to support its life.  What conclusion could it draw from this?

The perfectly reasonable inference it made from the available data was that it was a unique and special flower.  It seemed unlikely that it would just happen to be planted in the perfect spot, so it assumed that its spot was chosen for it.  What it did not know, of course, was the spot it lived in was perfect precisely because all imperfect locations had not supported its brethren.  It happened to land where it did, and the reason it thrived was due to the conditions being perfect -- the perfect conditions were the reason it thrived, but it does not follow logically that the location was chosen with intent  (there's that word again).

So what is logical (and in fact true in our little scenario) is that the only special plants that live long enough to wonder about why they are planted in the perfect spot are those who happen to be planted in a place that supports them!  This is, you may know, a restatement of the Weak Anthropic Principle:

we must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.

In other words, we see the Universe is the way it is because if it were another way, we would not be around to see it.  Or stated from the point of view of the flower, "Had I been planted somewhere else less suitable to my life, I would not have lived long enough to wonder about why I am where I am."

Jurgen Schmidhuber restates this principle eloquently withe the idea that the odds of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 100%.   So it follows, of course that we can't read anything into why the world is "so perfect for us".  We can never exist in a universe where we could ask the question, "Why is this universe so impossible for me to live in?"   (Unless you are an angst ridden teenager, of course...)

Pardise, Jan Brueghel, c. 1620

Why Me?

Weak Anthropic Principle or not, we can forgive the inference, "Because this place is perfect for me, it must have been made for me."  While not strictly logical, think of the relative sophistication of the mind that first conceived this notion.  An early human, still struggling with the vagaries of weather and harvests and the motion of the stars would scarcely have the capacity to reason his way to the Weak Anthropic Principle.  And those special minds who could manage the task would not be able to explain it to the less developed minds they were surrounded by.  Far more popular would be the seemingly obvious notion that we exist because of Divine Intent.  In any case it would be hard to infer much about humanity with only the one example to go on.

One More Trip Back to Conspiracy Land

It is worth reiterating what this early mind, this newly conscious being, is trying to do.  The conscious and logical mind can see order and causality.  The inference is made that if some things are causal, then all things must be causal.  These relationships are sought out in the world.   The season is cold because the Sun is leaving.  Everything is dying.  The Sun is coming back so everything is coming back to life.  Early causality is fraught with observational error even while the essence of the notion is often correct.  The weather affects crops.  This is true.  Early conclusions about what affected the weather (even what weather was), however, were false.  It is well known that the term for the study of weather -- meteorology -- comes from the early misconception that meteors affected the weather.

Finding order by applying reason to the world around us has had a huge survival benefit for our species.  And when the conclusions are essentially correct, the survival benefit remains EVEN IF the reasoning that leads to these conclusions is faulty.  If we think what makes the Asparagus Berry poisonous is that it is inhabited by an evil spirit, that does not diminish the survival value of avoiding the berry.

So from a logical perspective, communities who applied logic and reason -- sometimes even faulty reasoning -- were more prosperous than those who did not.  The rational mind survives because it provides an important tool to endure in a hostile world.  By the time human beings formed communities, the impulse to find order and causality in the world would be genetically entrenched.  Those who could not, or would not, view the world as a series of causal relationships would not endure long enough to pass on their customs.

Cause and Intent

The major problem we have had historically is in terms of understanding Causal relationships without ascribing Intent to them.   This is the old problem of How versus Why that we discussed earlier.  But understanding HOW something happens tells of nothing of WHY.  And here's another shocker.  If you examine the history of our scientific discoveries -- our catalog of causal relationships -- you come to the inescapable conclusion that our track record for explaining HOW things happen is not very good, either.

Plato and Aristotle,
arguing over where to have lunch

Aristotle explained that air rises in water and stones sink because all elements have a tendency toward their state in nature, and air is above water and Earth is below it.  So even though he was seemingly trying to describe WHY something happened, he was also talking about HOW it happened.  And except in the simplest terms, he got it wrong.  He thought he was observing an interplay of basic elements.  He was not.  Since he did not know who the actors on stage were, he could not understand the story that was taking place.

You may think I am merely cherry picking ancient science that could not possibly compete with our modern understanding of the world.  But any example I could choose would amount to the same thing. Before Sir Isaac Newton there was no coherent understanding of the force of gravity.  And despite Newton's considerable insights into the matter, even his laws were no match for reality.  Einstein's Relativity showed that Newton's explanation of how bodies moved (not WHY they moved, but HOW) was simply wrong.  It was mostly right.  Or right in some cases, most of which pertained to our Earth-bound existence, but he was not, strictly speaking accurate.  Using Newtonian mechanics to describe the motion of Mercury around the Sun resulted in a small error which could not be explained.  Some suggested the influence of an as-of-yet undiscovered planet.  Einstein put the issue to rest with a more accurate set of laws to describe HOW gravity works.  Or more precisely how it behaves (for whatever reason).  Einstein''s Theories are silent on WHY gravity exists, of course.

One could argue the point I am trying to make is not relevant in a modern context.  You could say that citing old science and talking about how it has been replaced by new more sophisticated scientific understanding is testimony to the success of science, not its failure.  We may have gotten things wrong in the past, but persistent application of the scientific method leads us to greater and greater accuracy about how things function in our universe.

You'd be right in a very limited way.  We certainly have a greater understanding than the ancient Greeks about how the stars and planets move.  And building on the science of those who have come before has lead us to greater and greater technology which in turn allows us to achieve even greater scientific progress.  Unfortunately, though, if the end point is complete understanding of the universe and the beginning is complete ignorance about our surroundings -- in other words if ignorance is the blank word puzzle and knowledge is one that is solved -- we have to accept that we are somewhere in the middle of the process.  Each new scientific breakthrough -- each new letter filled into the word -- reveals many more possibilities and questions even as it sheds a bit more light on the solution.

In essence, the word just keeps getting longer the more we try to solve it.  We no sooner get a grasp of basic chemistry than we find out about the structure of the atom.  Exploration into valence electrons and isotopes only leads us to the quarks and leptons which are the building blocks of the atoms themselves.

If you went to high school sometime in the middle portion of the 20th century, you may think of the atom as being composed of electrons and protons and neutrons.  While that basic concept hasn't changed, particle physicists are now describing the world of the very tiny in terms of 25 elementary particles!  [That is six quarks, six leptons of which the electron is one, and 13 bosons including the Higgs boson, accidentally named the "God particle" in the layman press.]

For every scientific success story we could tell -- about progress in neuroscience and psychology and medicine and physics and chemical engineering, etc. etc., we would have to face up to the fact that every 20 years shows us how little we actually understood about the subject 20 years earlier.  That level of progress is great.  It is certainly no argument for abandoning the pursuit of science.  But it is powerful evidence that whatever we think we know now about reality will be replaced in short order by a different level of understanding.  So to put it bluntly, we may think we are getting smarter, but we have to accept that some of our greatest concepts will be viewed as horribly naive and over simplified in the span of just a few generations.

So, again.  It's not that we do not make progress in science.  But we can't view that progress as being any sort of sign that our current concept of the universe is in any meaningful way "correct".

Ben Franklin, seemingly annoyed to
find himself on a
Soviet postage stamp in 1956

Imagine traveling back in time to talk science and politics with Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson  (this is something I fantasize about quite often).  It would be delightfully challenging to explain the future to them in terms that they could understand.  Much of the basics, if properly presented, would pose only minor theoretical hurdles to their understanding.  But taken as a whole, they could scarcely grasp the speed and pervasiveness of energy and travel and communication.  Even if they believed you as you described life in the early 21st century, they would never truly appreciate how anything functioned.

So now imagine that you are deemed worthy of a visit from a similarly interested person 227 years from now -- in the year 2240.  Even if we make the very clearly incorrect assumption that change will not accelerate over these 230 years -- even if we simply mapped a degree of change onto the future that is approximately equal to the last 230 years -- we'd have a very hard time keeping up with a description of life in the middle of the 23rd century.  We would be prepared to accept that there were advances in medicine and nutrition.  It would be no surprise to find that people live longer.  Breakthroughs in energy transmission would almost go without saying.  But if our time traveling friend tried to explain the science behind the technology, we'd almost certainly be lost.

We could speculate wildly on what the next 230 years might bring, but the point is that what we view today as the success of our world view -- the application of logic and science in the quest for greater understanding -- would have to be seen as a mediocre accomplishment at best.  We'd be reduced to the role of high school gym stars talking about our basketball prowess with Michael Jordan.

At every point in our history we think we know the world around us.  And with each passing year, we see historically that our simplistic comprehension has been rather quaint.   So logic insists that we accept this:  Despite our feelings to the contrary, we do not understand the world around us at all.

Our causal view of reality yields some benefits of understanding HOW things happen which are quickly made obsolete.  In the meantime, we make little or no progress with the more interesting question of WHY.

Maybe You are Already a Conspiracy Theorist and Don't Know it Yet

What an exciting idea for a movie.  Some guy is just going about his business feeling smug for not being so stupid as to believe that The Boston Marathon Bombing was a false flag terrorist attack, when something happens and he realizes that he has been part of a conspiracy all along.  Or maybe a woman is living a perfectly normal life, regarding the poor lost souls who believe in conspiracies with a mix of pity and contempt when she is suddenly informed that the very principles she uses to guide her own life are nothing but oversimplified conspiracy theories.

Of course, these things could never happen in real life, right?  Because there are those who grasp reality and those who let their imaginations get the best of them.  And we are the smart ones.  We always live in the real world and leave the fantasies to others.  We are so much smarter than everyone else... and proud of it.

On The Rachel Maddow Show the other night, Ms. Maddow interviewed Alice Hoagland, a woman whose son died on Flight 93, the 9/11 plane that went down in Shanksville, PA.

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The interview starts at 14:46.  Alice Hoagland uses words like "loony" to describe conspiracy theorists.  She recounts that she admonished them at one point:

You really need to consider a theory before you take it to your bosom, and, folks, you're being sold a bill of goods here.

She explains that these folks "reduce everything to theory" and

I've come to the conclusion that you really can't talk to these folks, you can't reason with them because they are so invested in the crazy story [they have gotten hold of].

And later she explains she simply thinks of them as "mental patients" because "they are off their rockers".

Well that is a stern appraisal from someone who (we hope) has a firm grasp of reality.  One could assume based on her dismissal of these crazy loons (who are so invested in their own ideas that they can not accept anything else), that Alice Hoagland is a lucid thinker in charge of her own mind.  Certainly she would never ascribe to anything so nutty as a "conspiracy theory."

Well let's think back to a few things we have said about conspiracy theories.  This is what we know:

1) To a conspiracy theorist, everything that happens is intentional.  It is part of a plan.

2) Conspiracy is linked to anxiety.  The more anxious something makes us about our place in the world, the more traction conspiracy theories will have.

3) Conspiracy Theories have an Event, Story, Reveal, Puppet Masters, and a Grand Plan.

And as we have touched upon but have not quite gotten to, the "evidence" that "proves" conspiracy in the minds of those who Ms. Hoagland calls "loonies" is usually not very straight forward.  It usually takes a lot of supposition and stretching to join the logical threads.  The lack of concrete evidence does not deter conspiracy theorists who say you must infer from the cracks in the official story.  The doubt cast in your mind by our imperfect ability to witness reality is where you must draw your assurance that conspiracy theories may be true.  We will explore this more later, but it was a critical component to touch upon now.

Because I want to examine this from a new angle.

What is one of the first things we hear when an inexplicable death occurs, especially of a child or someone in a horrible random event, like a bombing at a public spectacle?  Someone usually says it was part of "God's Plan."  The solace they offer is that we can't understand the mysteries of the world and that horrible and inexplicable and seemingly undeserved tragedies befall us in life, but we shouldn't worry, because God has a plan.


Earlier I wrote:

 It is very unnerving to live in a world where transformative (and usually horrible) events can take place without warning and for no good reason.  So a conspiracy theory seeks to provide peace of mind by showing how the seemingly random event was not random at all but was in fact part of someone’s plan. 

Ms. Hoagland herself claims that the best way she can think of to deal with conspiracy theorists is to use the "serenity prayer".

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

If this is true, we can assume that Ms. Hoagland is not an atheist.  Yet wasn't she just chastising these crazy people for boiling everything down to theory and, basically, not doing the math?

Mr. Universe

I want to spend a great deal of time on this so I will be coming back to it quite often.  Not because I think that if you believe in God you must be insane, but rather just the opposite.  If you can be a sane person and believe in God, then you must be very careful about the names you call others who believe things that they have no evidence to support.

And just as importantly, we need to realize that the quest for answers and order in the universe that leads us to the idea of God is part and parcel the same drive that leads conspiracy theorists to their explanations.


Remember my comment:

The Grand Plan is the explanatory bow that ties up the package into a neat orderly and self contained idea.

I was talking about conspiracy theories at the time, but couldn't I just as easily have been talking about religion?

There are those who will claim that there is a difference here.  But there is no difference, not of any significance.  Whether I believe that the government faked the 9/11 attacks in order to take away our freedoms and start a war in the Middle East or I believe that God hand selected the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre because he has a Divine Plan for how the universe unfolds, I am ascribing speculative motives to powerful forces with not a shred of evidence beyond conjecture.

Now, don't forget, I have gone to some pains in my past comments to stress that part of having an open mind means that you must accept that anything can be true, at least at first blush.   So I am not saying that there is no God and there is no Divine Plan.  But it is undoubtedly the same mental process that makes one seek order from existential chaos which produces the conspiracy theory or makes us quest for God .   Maybe there is a god pulling levers and controlling the universe.  I happen to doubt it. But I wouldn't call someone a loony for thinking so, or at least not any more of a loony than anyone else who believes conspiracy theories.  And I am suspicious of people who begrudge others their quest for order in a chaotic world.  I may find their answers a little too pat.  I may think they don't comport well with reality as I have experienced it.  But that would apply equally well to many religious people I have known as it would conspiracy theorists.  Who am I to be the arbiter of where someone seeks order and meaning?

Is a person who says that the Boston Marathon Bombings were a false flag attack more wrong than a person who claims that a rape resulting in pregnancy is God's will?  What if the person says that neither event was God's will but God had the power to stop it and did nothing (presumably because he has a plan)?  As soon as you bring your faith in God into a discussion of conspiracy theory, you have lost the intellectual high ground.

So one more time, just to summarize.  Ms. Hoagland argues that you just can't REASON with these people, and then cites the serenity prayer as her coping mechanism.  Does that really sound like reason is the guiding principle of her life?  It sounds more like her faith is what gives her strength.  Yet she belittles others for having an unshakable belief in something she disagrees with.  It may be true that they have no rational reason for believing what they do about 9/11.  But does she have a rational reason for believing in God?  Can we really expect others to believe only what is reasonable while we ourselves resort to faith to define our place in the cosmos?  Is there a map that shows us where reason applies and where faith is necessary?   Is faith just something we use when we want to believe something but can't find any evidence for it?  What does it say about your own awareness if you allow yourself to believe in things which are not logical but call others loonies for holding illogical beliefs?

I know, I am probably barking at the moon.  As Ms. Hoagland herself suggested, you just can't reason with some people.