People are always asking Christopher Hitchens (“On God,” July/August 2007), “How would we teach morality in the absence of God?” The same way we do now—by precept and admonition. “Big boys don’t cry” becomes “Soldiers do their duty.”
One of the lessons we learn is the Golden Rule—screw not, that ye be not screwed. In his blood donation example, Hitchens comes to the conclusion that the social basis of morality is symmetry. It may sound like “arid pragmatism,” but that’s how social interaction works. Injecting God into the equation destroys the symmetry. If God were the arbiter of moral truth, the slavery and war of the Bible would be moral.
An evolutionary explanation of morality approaches the Hitchens inquiry from a different angle. Sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson maintain that enculturation is just one level of evolution. They posit that multi-level natural selection favors group dynamics that contribute to collective well-being.
Political scientists like Alan Dershowitz examine The Theory of Rights as a collective response to wrongs. Rights, like morality, are not revealed truth; they are mechanistic developments from our experience of injustices. The basis of law is customary fairness
Why are atheists as ethical as nuns (perhaps neither is perfect, but comparable in the aggregate)? Because humans learn how to be human from other humans—culturally, not theistically.
Marshall L. Smith
Rockville, Maryland
The story “We’re all Pod People Now” (May/June 2008) was a great article. If we observe nature around us, we see that seeds of life are carried by birds, or like the dandelion, the seeds will drift with the winds. It would be only natural that the universal seeds of life would have a way to travel the vastness of space and that would be through meteorites and comets.
Paul Dale Roberts
Elk Grove, California
Congratulations on finding an author (P.J. O’Rourke, “On God,” March/April 2007) capable of writing such a convincing parody of what appear to be his own ideas that only a complete fool with no knowledge of either science or religion would be able to make any sense of his argument. Is this person deliberately trying to embarrass a god he believes in and denigrate science, thus demonstrating his own inability to think? Or is he supposedly attempting to be funny by cleverly trying to satirize what he conceives to be the ridiculous defenses of gods and science purportedly put forth by their actual respective supporters? With a world of clearly stated rational points of view to choose from, why publish such childish, pointless gibberish?
W. Eugene Claburn
West Windsor, New Jersey
This imagined dialogue between Salviati and Simplico (from Galileo’s dialgoues) was inspired by P.J. O’Rourke’s recent piece, “On God” (March/April 2007). Salviati represented Galileo’s ideas, while Simplico believed that Earth was the center of the universe. Pope Urban VIII was unhappy with the book, since he thought Simplico was actually himself.
SALVIATI: “Theology is such a large and diverse field of knowledge, it leads me to think that God is entirely man-made.”
SIMPLICO: “Yes, so you say, but biology is such a large and diverse field of knowledge, it leads me to think that life is entirely man-made.”
SALVIATI: “Yes, the knowledge of biology is man-made, not life.”
SIMPLICO: “Yes, so you say, but the knowledge of theology is man-made, not God.”
SALVIATI: “Yes, but the knowledge of life is found in every direction. The knowledge of God is found only in books and words, which are entirely man-made.”
SIMPLICO: “Yes, so you say, but the knowledge of God is found in every direction. The knowledge of life is found only in books and words, which are entirely man-made.”
Get the point? Life wins, God loses.
Jim Carlson
Hyannis, Massachusetts
I followed a link to Mr. O’Rourke’s musings (March/April 2007) on god and science, and stuck around to read some other entries at your site. The circular arguments for the omnipotent capital “G” god appear to be exercises of unreasoned belief. The underlying assumption that such a god exists arises from the worldview and type of “science” that read our fate in the stars, had the sun revolving around a flat earth and accepted voodoo as the height of medical care. It would seem the saving of religion exempts it from reason and relies on a closed logical system that does not admit the possibility that god does not exist.
If I know anything about science, it is that the scientific method only works when all “givens” are challenged. Science does not rest on an unproved absolute. You can wrap all of the arguments in the vestments of pseudoscience, but the basic challenge of provability gives the lie to such a delusional fantasy.
Good luck and I hope you don’t fall off when you get to the edge of the universe.
Jerry Lastow
San Francisco, California
Regarding P.J. O’Rourke’s recent discussions of science and religion (“On God”, March/April 2007; “Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death,” September/October 2008):
I do interpreting studies of Bible writings and here’s what I’ve discovered, which religion is trying very hard to either disprove or ignore: When Genesis uses the words Adam/man it may refer to a Hebrew synonym meaning ruddy, rosy, the flush of red blood. When “man became a ‘living soul’ “ (Genesis 2:7) it does not suggest a ‘human’ being but rather a ‘ruddy’ creature (as coming from the ‘red’ earth -dust/ground-primordial soup)
Adam/man was not initially a human being as many believe but rather a ‘ruddy creature of earth’: an animal, which must have been a chimpanzee, as is very clearly seen in recent human genome DNA mapping.
Religious tendencies are observed strictly in the ‘human’ species. Why aren’t such tendencies evident in primates? Could it be because we have something primates don’t have?
If Mr. Darwin merely studied God’s creation and told us what he saw there, wouldn’t that make him God’s advocate rather than God’s enemy?
Dawn Wessel
Mundare, Alberta, Canada
EEager to see your new “Search” format [eds. note: the magazine recently switched titles], I received and opened my last issue from a tough white plastic shipping bag. The cover still said “Science & Spirit” on the July/August 2008 issue, but that bag was something else. Sure, it preserved the shiny new magazine, but that plastic is much tougher than a supermarket bag. Your nature-friendly position is great in print, but it takes more than talk to make things happen in the real world. Please consider not using these heavy-duty mailing bags.s.
Steve Willey
Sandpoint, Idaho
The article “Flesh Made Soul” (March/April 2008) doesn’t seem to represent what I would describe as “good science.” Its conclusions seem utterly ass-backward to me. Blood rushing to the face doesn’t cause the feeling of embarrassment, because the brain itself had to cause the rush of blood to the face in the first place. If being too close to an uncontrolled bear makes the body tense, heart race, and such, it wasn’t that state that caused the fear, it was again the brain that caused that state. Embarrassment and fear were the causes of changes in physiological state in the first place, controlled by the brain, and not the other way around. Are they alleging some sort of feedback loop where the changes in body state then amplify the emotion signals in the brain? I don’t see that is what they’re claiming.
The real genesis of emotions is the external senses, which cause the brain to generate emotional states based on sensory input, which then causes the brain to change other physiological factors to motivate certain actions that it determines are necessary: a face flushed with blood or a body awash in adrenaline are abnormal states and “uncomfortable”, so the cells of the body will then act to return the body to a comfortable state. In that way I might concede a feedback loop of sorts, where the actions of the body then amplify an emotional state in the brain, but it’s still the brain in the driver’s seat. Their suggestion that the rest of the body “feels” emotions or plays any direct part in creating them is just desperately dumb.
Reading that article made me think immediately of “dark matter” and “dark energy”: desperate attempts to explain something for which we don’t yet have any real observational evidence. This theory is no different, no less desperate. If they now start trying to hang other theories off of this one as if it’s already a proven “law,” as some so-called scientists have been doing with respect to dark matter and dark energy, then it truly is bad science.
Mark Craig
Sacremento, California
In the article “Daniel Dennett’s Darwinian Mind” (November/December 2006) there is again a failure to challenge Dennett on his assertions (based on faith) that Darwin’s theory is the universal acid, even though to date it has not accounted for cosmos, culture, or mind.
We can understand the Newtonian/Einsteinian cosmos, or Wallace/Darwinian nature, even Cartesian/Freudian mind with the “theory of culture,” the next frontier of science, and without necessarily unifying these areas of understanding. Dennett’s persistence in accounting for the universal acid is in denial of the evidence and undermines his attempts to overextend his brand of Darwinism into fields where its explanatory power badly fades. Even Darwin wrote that natural selection reduces in effect as the social world unfolds. There’s also artificial selection, man’s methodical selection. And we are only one species with a variety of selections beyond natural selection. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s 1996 comments on “the Lamarckian juggernaut” of culture will prove closer at accounting for culture than Darwin’s theory does.
The year 2009 is not only the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of “The Origin of Species” it is also the 150th year of absence of a Darwinian general theory of culture. Despite several attempts there is none, and that is something Dennett, Dawkins, and Co. can’t just brush off. It is a lasting evidential truth that the universal acid Dennett refers to is, to date, a literary fiction. It doesn’t apply to the cosmos, culture, or mind. To take one example, biologist Gerald Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism” is an ill-worded theory of mind which fails to bridge with culture, which signals a fundamental limitation. It’s an idea, not a theory of mind.
A theory of culture to unify social science, bridge with natural science, deepen our understanding of evolutionary theory, and locate faith as a kind of epistemology different from social, natural and physical sciences is just around the corner. I can assure you it meets the rigors of natural, physical, and faith epistemologies. Next year may well begin as the year of Darwin, but it’ll end as the year of culture. It’s an exciting time.
Mark Cowan
Glasgow, Scotland
Your recent title change to “Search: Science, Religion, and Culture” reminds me of theologian Paul Tillich’s statement: “Culture is the form of religion, religion is the substance of culture.”
This was the theme of the session “Science and Religion at the Dawn of the 3rd Millennium,” which I organized for the International Paul Tillich Conference in June 1999.
Paul E. Carr
Bedford, New Hampshire
I found the recent article “What Took You So Long” (by Sam Kean, July/August 2008) interesting, but I question the validity of the mathematical equations and other theories that Andrew Watson derived at the conclusion, namely that the Earth contained nothing but “pond scum” for billions of years and then approximately 500-million years ago plant life, animals, and micro-organisms formed on this planet, which we call Earth.
What imagination to conjure up such fictional theories on the origin of our planet and all living matter on it. Also, scientists today are suggesting that there exists a possibility that other planets, or worlds, such as ours may exist in the universe, and also that there may be other universes.
Mr. Watson also attempts to validate the existence of intelligent life on this planet by the theory of self-replicating organic molecules, the precursors of life, and says the fact that each critical step required about 1-billion years on earth neatly explains why evolution took so long. Such a theory cannot be proven and will never be so as we humans do not have the answers to the true time-frame about the origin of Earth and all living organisms. Also, to advocate that the Sun will burn out and the Earth will draw to a close is absolutely wrong logic. First of all, no one can provide absolute evidence as to the age of the Sun, nor planet Earth!
Are we to believe that the elephant, tiger, and all animal life came about through some molecules’ transformations and that man accidentally evolved thousands of years ago? Think of the billions of different plant species, insects, and reptiles that were on Earth apparently before humans evolved. How on earth can we humans accept such facts when such things cannot be proven? The evolution theory that has been invoked over the many years cannot account for all forms of living matter on Earth, especially human beings. To the best of my knowledge, humans did not evolve from primates, nor from a molecule to provide a human form, legs, arms, eyes, and all eternal organs that keep the human body functioning.
I for one believe that the human with its mortal body and spiritual mold had to be created by the most superior intelligence, such as a deity. The universe(s) are infinite and always changing.
In conclusion, I found your magazine rather interesting, with some very thought-provoking articles.
Donald E. Evett
Bountiful, Utah
Sam Kean responds: Dear Mr. Evett: You write, “To the best of my knowledge, humans did not evolve from primates ...” Unfortunately, mixing personal beliefs with science can get rather tricky, and to the best of virtually every scientist’s knowledge, humans did in fact evolve from the same common ancestor as modern-day primates. Most scientists, and many religious leaders I hasten to add, after carefully weighing all the evidence, also believe that the processes of evolution by natural selection can in fact account for the astounding variety of life around us. But you are correct that the origin of life on earth is hotly debated, and I’m glad Prof. Watson’s paper, and my article about it, succeeded in provoking your thoughts on this important topic.
