Then I try to teach them about evolution and modern cosmology and it just doesn’t grab their attention. I don’t have personal experience of how to teach children about evolution and so on because my parents are creationists. There are amazingly few books aimed at really young children on the subject. At least I couldn’t find many. I tried to make it up as I went, but I was doing a pretty crumby job of telling the story.
“So you see, the mammals evolved into apes and then into human beings. Isn’t that cool?”
“…”
So, anyway, I was a bit jealous.
Then I found a delightful trilogy of books that take us from the first moments of the Big Bang to modern humans. They take the form of a letter from a personified Universe to the reader. The Universe tells its own story in colorful, comprehensible terms. The words are accompanied by equally colorful illustrations. The reader is placed in the middle of an epic adventure of truly universal proportions.
Born with a Bang starts with the big bang and ends with the formation of planet earth. Along the way we learn about inflationary theory (really!), particles and anti-particles, the formation of hydrogen, the birth of stars and galaxies, and how we are made of the stardust from a supernova. The second and third books, Lava to Life and Mammals that Morph, which I have read fewer times so far, tell our story from abiogenesis to the development of modern humans. I’m no astrophysicist or paleontologist, but everything seems to check out. The authors stuck close to the current scientific understanding.
Any books that can get my four-year-old asking about atomic forces, comparing black holes to bathtub drains, and remembering why grass grows from the bottom-up deserve an A+ in my book.
The books are too long for my two-year-old, though I think she would like the story and illustrations if I just skimmed through. Each page has boldface text which convey the central idea. I think the authors may have intended it just for the purpose of shortening the story for those with a short attention span. I plan to try it out soon.
To top off all the learning about science, the Universe uses its own story to teach the reader important lessons like life is risky, we have to work toward our dreams, diversity is important, and so on.
While this book makes no mention of religious ideas, it is not hostile to religion either. I believe that a religious parent who accepts the current scientific theories (even the Pope accepts the theory of evolution) can benefit from these books. If God acted through the Big Bang and evolution, then these books tell God’s creation story in an inspiring way.
These books present an engaging creation myth that isn’t fiction. I got the books in the hopes of teaching my girls about current scientific theories about human origins. I ended up being inspired by my place in the story of the universe.
]]>It is a collection of writings from authors such as Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, StanisÅ‚aw Lem, and Jorge Borges on the subject of mind, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That’s exactly what I’ve been pondering lately. The authors present conflicting viewpoints (they promise to make everyone think) and then present their responses to the essay. A simple, very effective format.
The authors delivered on their promise. The book caused me to take a long look at what exactly it means to be a conscious, intelligent being. What is the self? Is there a soul? Can consciousness be explained reductively by interactions of neurons? What gives rise to our experience of consciousness? Many were the thought provoking moments that I spent with this book.
By the way, this is the book that I was reading in that Indian bistro a while ago.
An excellent read.
]]>Things got more interesting (and more verbose all around) when Blake entered the fray (I believe this is Blake Ostler). The discussion has veered to the topic of the validity of “spiritual” experiences as a foundation for knowledge and a philosophical attack on naturalism.
Interesting, wide-ranging discussion.
]]>Yet, I thought, it isn’t truly outside our experience because we lose consciousness every night when we enter dreamless sleep. All conscious experience ceases.
Then I pondered what this would mean if we had a soul. As a Mormon, I was taught to believe that my spirit existed before I was born. I had an existence before this life where I reasoned, loved, made choices, learned, and so on like I do here. If this is true, what happens to that spirit when I lose consciousness? Why must that eternal spirit sleep while its physical body sleep? Why does the physical body have power to extinguish the spirit’s capacity to experience and reason and learn while the body sleeps? Surely if the spirit had those faculties before having a body, then those faculties shouldn’t depend on the state of the body.
Perhaps the way I believed before was too simplistic. Perhaps there could be a spirit within me which has an experience entirely independent and inaccessible to my body’s consciousness. Or perhaps the soul has no role in my ability to reason, remember, experience, etc. Occam’s razor applies here. I should be very reluctant to multiply extra entities to explain a phenomenon which has a simpler explanation: I have no soul.
]]>Their language was unintelligible to outsiders. I learned this when some neighborhood kids mimicked what they heard my sister say. “Duh, duh, duh,” they taunted her. I loved her and it hurt to see her mocked, but I didn’t want to be dumb by association. I stood by and left my sister undefended.
Years later in high school, I had a chance to redeem myself. I stood outside the locker room when one of the short school buses pulled up. I was looking somewhere else when I heard one of the guys yell “Dog! Ugly!” I turned around to see that my sister was the target of this attack. She attended the same school as I did; she had been mainstreamed as they called it. Redemption would have to wait for another day. The situation stunned me into inaction. I was too ashamed of my sister to stand up and defend her.
To this day, when I hear people say offhandedly “that’s retarded” it feels like an attack on my brother and sister, but I don’t say anything. How do I explain without seeming too thin-skinned?
Even though I loved my brother and sister, I often wished that they weren’t retarded. I wished that they could have been normal. Mormonism holds out that hope. It teaches that mentally retarded children were especially valiant champions in God’s cause during our existence before we were born. As perfect innocents, they are assured of their salvation and exaltation in God’s Kingdom when they die.
As a corollary, I would someday meet my brother and sister without the false burden of mental retardation. I have daydreamed all my life about the day that I would meet them and be able to have a normal conversation. I imagined how they would look: normal at last. They wouldn’t make people feel uncomfortable anymore. They wouldn’t embarrass me anymore. I would be proud to be their brother.
Maybe you can understand why it is heartbreaking for me to give up that hope. I now realize that there is no immaculate soul hidden inside my siblings, untainted by retardation. When they die, no sparkling gem will ascend to heaven. The retardation isn’t the illusion. My little brother and sister are retarded.
Instead of loving my brother and sister as they truly are, I have been hoping to meet someone who doesn’t exist. I have been ashamed of their true selves. I will never be able to talk to them, except in our shared language.
]]>Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law…
Love is the law, love under will
(The Book of the Law 1:40, 57)
I have been doing what was expected of me for most of my life. I was living my life according to the desires of others. Who I was and what I wanted was sacrificed in the quest to become like God. My law was God’s law as it had been taught to me.
I jettisoned that law when I realized that God was a fiction. I discovered that God was only the collective desires of humanity which had changed through the ages as humanity changed. My switch from believing Mormon to strongly atheistic agnostic was the first act of real consequence that I made contrary to expectations. I was doing what I wanted despite others’ desires. My repudiation of God was also a repudiation of the expectations that had been placed on me. The heady power and freedom of that act felt really good. It must be something like the feeling of getting up from your sick bed after months of confinement.
I no longer recognize anyone’s authority to tell me what is morally right and wrong. They have no more standing to pontificate on morality than I do because they don’t have an ersatz God to back them up. There is no absolute standard for behavior. I decide what I will do because I want to do it.
That may sound like a prescription for licentious behavior, especially to those who have listened to too many Sunday School lessons telling them how evil we would be without God. One may imagine that I hope for a life full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Life’s short. Live hard. Die young.
But that’s not what I want. I want to live happily, faithfully with my wife. I want to experience life’s adventures with her. I want to walk alongside my children as they experience the wonderful world that they’re so extraordinarily privileged to be a part of. I want to see who they were born to be unfold. I want to learn everything I can in life’s short day. I want to regain my sense of wonder and see the world with new eyes. I want to help others. I want to make a difference to someone. I want someone to miss me when I’m gone.
I will do what I want, and to hell with anyone who gets in my way.
]]>[two friends are deep in discussion over a pot of tea]
Christy: All things denote that there is a God.
Me: What? I don’t really follow your reasoning.
Christy: Look around us. We live in a world full of wonder and beauty. How did all this get here if there is no God?
Me: I have some ideas, but I don’t know exactly.
Christy: See. It must have been created by God.
Me: Just because we don’t know how something happened isn’t a good reason to jump to the conclusion that God did it. If we always used that kind of reasoning, we would have never cured smallpox or figured out what kept the planets in orbit around the sun. We would be stuck in the dark ages.
Christy: Then how do you explain the world’s existence?
Me: Like I said, I don’t really know how, but from what I’ve seen, I imagine that it has arisen from the operation of natural laws.
Christy: But who created those laws?
Me: Wait, you’re assuming that the laws had to be created by someone. You’re begging the question a bit, don’t you think?
Christy: Okay, so where did the laws come from?
Me: I don’t know that either, but I suppose you’re going to tell me God created them.
Christy: Well, yes.
Me: We seem to be back to where we started. Let me ask a question. Where did God come from?
Christy: God is the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause. He is uncreated by definition.
Me: How is that different than if I said that the natural laws were uncaused? Saying that God is uncreated doesn’t really help explain anything, it’s just an attempt to salvage your belief in God.
Christy: …
[they are joined by a third friend]
Christy: Hey Molly!
Me: Hi Molly. Sit down. Would you like some tea?
Molly: No, thank you. Against my religion and all that.
Me: I know. [smiles] Christy is trying to convince me that God exists, and we were just discussing where he came from. Christy was just going to tell me how God being uncreated is any more reasonable than natural laws being uncreated.
Molly: Well that’s easy. God was created. God was once mortal like we are and progressed to become a God, just like we can.
Me: So he lived like us and had his own God like us and his own savior like Jesus.
Molly: Well, its not official doctrine, but yeah that’s what I’ve always thought.
Me: Have you ever asked where God’s God came from?
Molly: Of course. God’s God became a god through the same process. The same with God’s God’s God, and God’s God’s God’s God before Him.
Me: But where does it stop? How did the first God become a god.
Molly: The line of gods doesn’t stop. It keeps going on forever.
Me: To be honest, it doesn’t sound like any of us have any better idea of how things came to be here. All of us end up waving our hands and saying “It’s been that way forever” whether we’re talking about God, natural laws, or the infinite line of gods. God or Gods don’t help to explain how everything came to be here any better than natural laws. But to believe in supernatural beings requires a lot more imagination.
Christy: What about how beatiful and nourishing the world is. It’s perfectly suited for us. Don’t you see God’s loving hand behind everything?
Me: Not really, no.
Christy: But we live on an Earth that is perfect for our survival. If any detail was different, we couldn’t live here.
Me: That’s true of course, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a God behind the scenes making the Earth perfect for us. It’s not too hard to demonstrate that our species evolved to thrive in the conditions here. I think it was Douglas Adams who said that your argument is like a puddle thanking God that its hole was exactly the right shape for it to fit in.
Christy: Look at all of the barren worlds in our solar system. Life didn’t evolve there. The chance that life would just happen due to random chance must be astronomically small.
Me: That’s an oxymoron isn’t it? [smiles] Even given a very small probability of life occurring on any single planet, if you remember that there is a tremendous number of planets in the universe there is still a good chance that it would happen at least once. And the only place someone would be sitting with their friends talking about it would be on that one planet where it happened. So here we are.
Molly: What about the stars, flowers, newborn babies, mountains, and streams? Doesn’t all this beauty show you that there is a loving God?
Me: Sorry to be a killjoy, but what about the Ebola virus, wars, tsunamis, earthquakes, and child molesters? By your reasoning, don’t they show that there is a wicked, vicious God?
Christy: We create a lot of those evils. God has no control over our free will.
Me: So you’re saying that God is not all-powerful, that the world isn’t under his control?
Christy: No, just that He chose to give us free will so that we could worship Him freely.
Me: Couldn’t he have created us so that we we would want to worship him of our own free will? Why did he give us the desire to do evil?
Christy: We couldn’t have free will without the temptation to do evil. We need a chance to choose between good and evil.
Me: So God couldn’t create us with every opportunity to do evil but without the disposition to do evil?
Christy: That wouldn’t be true free will.
Me: Then God isn’t absolutely omnipotent. Or if he could create us with no disposition to do evil, but he chose not to, then he is evil himself because he caused the evil.
Molly: God couldn’t create us that way because part of us is uncreated and eternal. We always existed as something called an intelligence. God had to work with this preexisting intelligence in order to create our soul. He didn’t create us in the strictest sense of the word.
Me: So God isn’t omnipotent?
Molly: I guess not. He has limits and rules that He has to obey.
Me: So why should we worship him if he’s not all-powerful?
Molly: Because He is morally perfect, omniscient, and our only hope of becoming gods someday.
Me: Without going off on a tangent about the definition of perfection and omniscience, that seems fairly reasonable. What about all the evil in the world that doesn’t come from our own actions? What about disease and natural disasters? What do those things say about God?
Christy: What do you mean?
Me: I mean, why did God put us here in such a miserable position? Innocent children die painful, gruesome, lonely deaths. Tsunamis kill hundreds of thousands of people. The world is full of suffering. All religions admit that this is so. This doesn’t tell me that there is a loving God.
Christy: All of God’s children will receive justice and love in the afterlife.
Me: You’re begging the question again. You can’t use the supposed fact of God’s love as part of an argument that there is a loving God.
Christy: God put us in this world to learn from our experiences of evil. God uses evil to teach us to be good.
Me: So God created evil? He used the Shoah for his own purposes? Child molesters are doing God’s work? Satan is really on God’s payroll? Doesn’t that make God evil?
…
Me: Listen. We could go round and round about this all day, but for the sake of discussion, let’s take that the world must have come about because of some supernatural entity. Why should I believe that your God created it? Nothing that I see tells me that יהוה, one of the gods of the Iron Age Canaanite pantheon, created the universe. The fingerprint of יהוה isn’t all over creation that I can see. Couldn’t we use the same reasoning to justify a belief in any creator-god?
Christy: That’s a whole different topic.
Me: I suppose it is, but you do see why I don’t look at the world and say “Wow! A loving God must have done that.” You see why it’s not an obvious conclusion for me to make. Right?
Christy: I guess so.
Me: I think you’re going out trying to find a reason to justify your preexisting belief in God. You’re looking for evidence to confirm your beliefs but ignoring the evidence that contradicts your beliefs. You see kittens and puppies and butterflies but ignore malaria and cancer and cystic fibrosis. You want to believe in God so you create these elaborate justifications for his existence instead of making natural conclusions. The most obvious conclusion to make based on all of the evidence taken together is that the universe is amoral: neither good nor evil. I see no evidence in the world to believe in your God. This method of trying to prove God is actually pretty weak. I remain unconvinced.
…
Me: Molly, would you like some tea?
Molly: No, thanks. Against my religion.
Me: I know. [smiles]
]]>Rather than general posts on atheism and religion, the purpose of the Humanist Symposium will be specifically to defend and uphold atheism as a positive worldview of morality, reason and purpose, a desirable and attractive alternative to belief systems based on religion.
I hope the symposium is a great success. We atheists will do much better at overcoming popular supernaturalism and superstition if we stop defining ourselves in contrast to theism. We need to spread the good word about the positive aspects of living a life without a god.
By labeling myself as an atheist, I’m making my job harder because that term centers around what I don’t believe. Instead, I should focus on what I do believe. I could call myself a naturalist humanist more appropriately and begin to get across what brings me joy and purpose.
]]>