What can we learn from all the suffering in the world?

There were a number of comments at Vic Reppertʼs blog recently about God not caring that people suffer either lightly or horribly, because all the suffering in the world and cosmos is merely so “we can learn;” a view that seems unfalsifiable of course, and I might ask what animals learn from their suffering. Is God purifying their souls as well? (Or did God give tapeworms—and other diseases along with predators—to deer, simply in order to teach mankind more “lessons?” As I said such a view remains unfalsifiable. But what about the past eons when humankind wasnʼt even around to see and “learn” anything from all the predation and parasites and natural disasters tormenting the animals? More unfalsifiable hypotheses can explain that of course.)

I think people “learn” plenty simply through interactions with fellow human beings (who are relatively healthy and not suffering great pains). We learn how to increase joys by sharing pleasures, and we learn how to decrease pains by having others commiserate with us. We learn how our feelings are hurt and how we hurt the feelings of others—as well as learning how to boost other peopleʼs egos and see them shine and be happy that blesses us as well. So we learn plenty about getting along and having friends and avoiding making enemies. But tossing in plagues and tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes and tornadoes and hurricanes and droughts and floods and parasites and diseases, not to mention genetic defects that make it impossible for a child to even lay down without his skin blistering up, so that the child spends every day of their short life in excruciating pain, as well as tossing in the fact that the female pelvis narrowed when humans became upright while the cranium grew, such that there is mortal peril involved in the very birthing process for both child and mother, is simply to apologize for things no sane person should have to apologize for. Apologizing for such things in creation appears to be to be a form of irrational madness. Iʼd sooner remain agnostic over such matters, or at least accept a God who employed Darwinian evolution, a Divine Tinkerer even, than try to attempt apologizing for such things. For a far larger list of such things see “Why We Believe in a Designer” Even ministers like Clayton Sullivan donʼt cotton to such apologetics. See Rev. Sullivanʼs statement in a companion piece, “The Most Provocative Things Ever Said About the Way God Designed the Cosmos”.

And the view that weʼre “learning” from the daily grind of suffering both physically and mentally also belies the fact that many people are permanently traumatized, or even driven mad by such suffering, or even kill their own children, or commit suicide due to it, such as people suffering tinnitus—a constant ringing in the ears that continues as they try to sleep, some of whom commit suicide after many sleepless nights.

Not to mention suffering the vast wealth of ignorance on this planet that harms us all in ways innumerable. Or suffering problems caused simply by miscommunication with others or between nations.

Lastly thereʼs the view that after all the suffering of this world thereʼs an eternal world of suffering that lay ahead for people who donʼt “believe” like “we” do.

Let me put it this way…

Perhaps all discussions of Christian apologetics with non-Christians should begin with the words of John G. Stackhouse Jr. in his book, Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), who wrote:

“The familiarity Christians enjoy for our own religion, especially given its privileged place in North American culture, keeps us from seeing, in the light of other world views, how weird it really is.” (p.16)

Welcome to the World of Christianity (by Harry McCall)

As a Christian, you are now following the supreme God who created the universe. The main facts you need to know are these:

Your God is omnipotent (Having unlimited power and authority).
Your God is omnipresent (He is present everywhere).
Your God is omniscient (Having total knowledge).
Your God commands billions of angels of which just one could destroy the world.

As a Christian, you are part of a large and diverse group totaling over 2.1 billion members that has a worldwide budget that totals approximately one half of a trillion dollars.

Satan (a fallen angel) is your main and only adversary who leads a small rag-tag army (1/3 the size of Godʼs) of fallen angels (demons).

Satan has limited power (Only what little control God gives him).
Satan has no earthly members (Just a few “Dabblers”).
Satan has no budget.

And yet…

According to Godʼs own word, the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation), God, with all the above supreme attributes, is losing a battle He created and even sacrificed His only begotten son to win.

For instance, most of humanity will one day stand before your God at the Great White Throne of Judgment to “give an account” of why they as mortal sinful creatures with limited understandings, screwed up, and then they will be cast into a Lake of Fire (whose smoke rises forever), i.e., blamed for their loss of innocence and (and/or their great great great ancestorʼs loss of innocence) for all eternity.

How Are We To Make Sense Of All Of The Above?

It is a divine Mystery. (A theological term employed by the Catholic Church to depict the lack of understanding we mere mortals have of Godʼs ways.)

Harry McCall (former ministerial student, whose testimony appears in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists)

P.S., Liberal Christians and universalists may disagree with some of the above “welcome” statements, however, Christian philosopher Victor Reppert at his blog, “Dangerous Idea” has tangled with the question of how a finite being like Satan could be racking up so many souls compared with God who has an infinite amount of resources and wisdom as His disposal.

“The Discomfiter,” Christian History, Crazy Human Primate Species

In a previous post I shared information about bad/crazy things religious people have done (and the craziness of the conflicting varieties of Christianities) in an effort to level the playing field when dealing with someone as crazy as “The Discomfiter” whom I assume to be a Christian in atheist clothing bent on showing how crazy atheists can be.

I was not condemning all Christians, nor would I suggest that a person should disbelieve in Christianity because of its failures. I disbelieved in Christianity after examining the Bible and also after acknowledging goodness, love, and wisdom in people other than Christians.

But some have pointed out to me the insanity of some atheist murderers and sex fiends, like Stalin, Mao, and the Marquis de Sade or even Jeffrey Dahmer who said he was an atheist when he committed his crimes, and also asked me to address the good that some Christians have done.

On charity and Christianity, or for that matter, civilization and Christianity, there are diverse opinions. But most would agree that Christianityʼs contributions in the arts and sciences peaked a while back. Today anyone of any religion or none can produce wonderful music, or impressive scientific research.

On health care/hospitals, itʼs true, in the early 1800s, religion was still the monopoly provider. And the hospitals themselves were each devoted to preaching the religion of a specific religious sect, and could turn away whomever they wished on that basis, or forbid the sick from being visited by ministers or rabbis of a rival sect while at the hospital but had to endure preachments made by that sectʼs ministers. Also in the early 1800s that system was failing—remember Dickens?—and the response came swiftly. Think of Florence Nightingale (a universalist Christian, a view others deemed heretical, who taught that hospitals should admit anyone regardless of beliefs and also allow them access to whatever minister or rabbi they wished), or think of the Red Cross (the American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton a universalist Christian, while the International Red Cross was founded by Andre Dunant—a gay man), Jane Addams and Hull House. New kinds of private, nonprofit organizations sprang up, as did unprecedented forms of government activity. Itʼs worth noting that most of the replacement institutions were not “lifestance organizations.” They werenʼt other churches or fraternal groups. Indeed, they tended not to be the kind of organizations that sorted their members by lifestance at all. In a word, they were secular.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who spent years in Africa as a doctor and helped to publicize the plight of suffering Africans, was a liberal Christian and author of The Search of the Historical Jesus in which he concluded that Jesus was a man who preached that the world was going to end soon. And, Helen Keller (the woman who lost her sight and hearing to a bout with Scarlet Fever when she was very young, but who learned how to communicate via touch, and who proved an inspiration to generations of people suffering from severe disabilities) was both a Swedenborgian, and a member of the American Humanist Society.

TODAY, a vast number of charities (including organizations devoted to finding cures for diverse diseases) are secular, or of a non-Evangelical Christian variety. There is the American Cancer Society, The Heart Association, The Will Rogers Institute, and many others. Thereʼs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that Gates poured 30 billion into, and his friend Warren Buffet poured a little bit more than 30 billion into. (Both of those men being reticent and reluctant to connect themselves with religion.)

In fact, if it were not for a host of scientists, engineers and agriculturalists—who happened to be either lapsed churchgoers, unorthodox Christians, heretics, apostates, infidels, freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists—and their successes in the fields of agricultural and medical science, hundreds of millions would have starved to death or suffered innumerable diseases this past century. Those agricultural and medical scientists “multiplied more loaves of bread” and “prevented/healed more diseases” in the past hundred years than Christianity has in the past two thousand.

Likewise, TODAY, institutions of higher learning are mostly secular and non-Evangelical.

Richard Dawkins, an atheist, also has made a remark I find interesting: “If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?” [quoted in The Guardian]

As for famous atheists who have been mass murderers, yes they have. But they were driven not only by selfish ideals, but also religious-like ones, like promises of a “workerʼs paradise,” or a holy book be it a “Communist Manifesto,” or in the case of Maoism, a “Little Red Book” with “verses” his people had to memorize. Such ideals and practices seem to motivate human primates en masse. Absolute certainty is certainly a huge temptation. Add the fact that the states and churches of Europe pounded the message into peopleʼs heads for centuries, “Obey!” People were fed up with that. And Marx was fed up with the system of state and church that was using and abusing people as interchangeable parts in factories, the same factories that Marxʼs religious counterpart, William Blake called, “Satanʼs mills.” As for Hitler and Stalin, apparently they both wanted to become priests in their youth. And Stalin it appears was well versed enough in the Bible to be aware of the story of the betrayal of Christ by someone near him, and killed anyone he feared might one day become his Judas. Mao arose during the confusion and upheavals of a World War. The Kymer Rouge I have read arose partly in response to Americaʼs war in Vietnam, especially illegal secret bombing missions conducted by the U.S. on the Cambodian-Viet Nam boarder. What Iʼm saying is that the history of human primates on this planet seems to have explanations of complex and varied sorts.

I think we were lucky that when Europe was going up in flames during the wars between Christian nation-states following the Reformation, they didnʼt have modern weaponry. That “Thirty Years War” has been compared to World War 1 without the modern weapons. Of course the Christian west had the advantage of guns and steel and was able to exert control over a lot of the world for a couple centuries (not to mention the advantages that the “germs” carried by westerners to the New World, brought the conquerors).

About serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, I read that he was raised Christian and in his youth attended a fundamentalist Christian school. He reverted back to his childhood faith in prison. Iʼm sure his victims wished he had reverted sooner. Perhaps the portrayal in his school of atheists as evil teachers of total irresponsibility made him think thatʼs all any atheist could or should be, and maybe he pawned off his own inclinations on “atheism,” as an excuse, based on such teachings. Honestly, I donʼt know many atheists in America who would agree that a great way to make friends is to keep peopleʼs heads in your freezer.

Steve Hays of Triablogue, The Discomfiter, and Stephen Colbert

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Absolute Idealism or Atheism? Or something else?

Some modern day philosophers like Daniel Hutto continue to defend “absolute idealism” which just goes to show that philosophy is STILL not lacking a variety of answers to the Big questions. What a wax nose philosophy is when it comes to the Big questions. Maybe the trouble is assuming too much for the explanatory properties of words and generalizations alone, words separate from the myriad of painstaking experiments that take lifetimes to complete, words that one can bend and reshape with other words just to make it seem one has “solved” a problem when even a coherent internally consistent answer is not necessarily THE “solution” but merely “a” solution? Speaking of such things, neither has anyone been able to disprove Leibnitzʼs hypothesis that the physical brain and the “spiritual” mind run completely parallel to one another in different worlds without even connecting, yet they remain parallel due to a “pre-established harmony.”

Thereʼs a new book about Bishop Berkeley, the British philosopher who believed that literally everything existed as an idea in the mind of God: The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Re-enchantment Fordham University Press (October 15, 2006) by Costica Bradatan. The author discusses the side of Berkeley who read and wrote alchemical books, designed utopian projects, and searched for “Happy Islands” and the “Earthly Paradise.” Berkeleyʼs new attitude toward the material world echoed the dualistic theology of the Cathars. Berkeleyʼs thinking was rooted in Platonic, mystical, and sometimes esoteric traditions, and he saw philosophy as, above all, a kind of salvation, to be practiced as a way of life. Bradatan uncovers is a much richer, true-to-life Berkeley, a more profound and spectacular thinker.

This topic also reminds me of the cover story on the latest issue of New Scientist, “You Are Made of Space-Time,” which begins:

“Physical particles may seem very different from the space-time they inhabit, but what if the two are one and the same thing? New Scientist investigates. LEE SMOLIN is no magician, yet he and his colleagues have pulled off one of the greatest tricks imaginable. Starting from nothing more than Einsteinʼs general theory of relativity, they have conjured up the universe. Everything from the fabric of space to the matter that makes up wands and rabbits emerges as if out of an empty hat. It is an impressive feat. Not only does it tell us about the origins of space and matter, it might help us understand where the laws of the universe come from. Not surprisingly, Smolin, who is a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, is very excited. ‘Iʼve been jumping up and down about these ideas,’ he says. This promising approach to understanding the cosmos is based on a collection of theories called loop quantum gravity, an attempt to merge general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single consistent theory…”
End of Excerpt

Smolin is an atheist (who also believes that there are untold numbers of cosmoses and that cosmoses appear to exist simply to produce black holes that help lead to the production of future cosmoses that produce more black holes, et al) however, what if heʼs right that at the bottom of everything is nothing? That would not halt theistic philosophers since they can Still ponder, “Where did the nothingness come from?” (Instead of the question theistic philosophers now asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”) And so the dance of philosophy goes on, atheist versus theist.

Thatʼs the cool thing about philosophy, its questions never end, and the proponents of each side can always find a way back to “giving it to the other guy.” I mean if you get down to the super tiny levels of the cosmos that we have no direct experience of, that even physicists have no provable ideas about, what exactly is at the “bottom” of it all? “Nothing?” But itʼs still a “nothing” that gave birth to “something” (that will one day go back to being “nothing,” etc.) So itʼs not purely “nothing.” And what might lay beneath this “nothing-that-sometimes-gives-birth-to-something-that-might-one-day-all-go-back-to-being-nothing?” What is “it?”

Iʼm not saying I agree with idealism and that “Godʼs ideas” must lay at “bottom,” Iʼm saying I donʼt know. Whatever “really” is there appears hidden, which raises questions of “divine hiddenness.” See Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, eds., Daniel Howard-Snyder, Paul Moser

Though I suspect there is plenty we DO know about the cosmos as we see it and experience it on our level that raises plenty of unanswered questions for us to ponder. Such as, “Is this the ideal moment in time for humans to have been created/evolved?” *smile* And what about this?

In Response to Free Parking & Improving The Universe

Vic,

Speaking of improving the universe it would appear that having womenʼs hip bones be a bit wider, or having them open up more completely and more flexibly during birth, would avert a lot of pain, and lower mortality rates for both newborns and mothers during childbirth. There was a pictorial and article about the evolution of upright hominids in National Geographic, “The Downside of Upright”, that explained the increased dangers during childbirth since humans have evolved an upright stance simultaneously with a larger cranium. The circle of bone through which the newborn must pass has narrowed as a result of the evolution of the hips for bi-pedalism.

Iʼve mentioned before that I donʼt think much of philosophy concerning the big questions. We could go round and round over the fact that thereʼs pain and death a plenty on this planet with the young of most species dying soon after fertilization (something like 50% of conceived eggs simply die, even in human beings); or they die during birth (see article); or they die during infancy or early childhood from a wide possible range of viruses, bacteria or even larger parasitic species or even members of the same species or larger predators who feast on the young (in fact a large percentage of the young of ALL species are devoured by such diseases); or they die of starvation or dehydration or natural disasters; or, most importantly, they die before they reach the age at which they are sexually mature and can pass along their genes to the next generation. Even if they survive all that, if they are male, they may get shunned by females of their species who prefer a different male, or they may engage in competitions of various sorts in which one male “wins” and gets to mate with the female while the other may perish or more likely slink off and not get to pass along their genes. So thereʼs a series of “hurdles” each living things passes through before it can get to leave its genes behind.

One could argue that “God” simply invented things that way, all the pain and suffering as added bonuses. All the “designs to defeat designs.” Or maybe “God” employed Darwinian evolution and things grew that way. Or maybe “God” isnʼt exactly the “Christian” or “Greek philosophical” ideal? I dunno.

I do think however that some folks are going to say, “God knows why he did it, so how can we know all the consequences like He has them all figured out? So end of conversation about ‘possible improvements.’”

While others are going to chime in with Voltaire who wrote, “The silly fanatic repeats to me… that it is not for us to judge what is reasonable and just in the great Being, that His reason is not like our reason, that His justice is not like our justice. Eh! how, you mad demoniac, do you want me to judge justice and reason otherwise than by the notions I have of them? Do you want me to walk otherwise than with my feet, and to speak otherwise than with my mouth?”

Some of my own questions concerning how the cosmos works and the inconceivably vast amount of apparent wastefulness itʼs machinations involve can be found in my tongue-in-cheek piece, “Why We Believe In A Designer”, and also see this part of my reply to Dembski:

[The “Intelligent Designer” as the I.D.ists portray him to be] doesnʼt sound like a highly impressive “micro manager,” I mean, “perfecting” so many species only for them to become extinct over and over again.

Hereʼs a question I have, based on three examples from nature:

1. The Bedbug — The male bedbug has a penis that penetrates the females abdomen in a traumatic act, but hereʼs the point I want to raise, only a single species of bedbug is known to have evolved to the point that males of that species penetrate the abdomens of Other Males while the first male is inseminating a female.
2. The Bombadier Beetle — Only one species of “bombadier” beetle has a moving turret to direct its spray, the rest can only spray in one direction, usually covering their own backs, and other species of beetles have similar overall anatomies and have chambers and produce similar chemicals but without spraying anything.
3. Homo Sapiens Sapiens — There is only one surviving species of human being but multiple known species of primitive primate and hominid species, all extinct. Based on such examples, my question is why does specialization in the cases I have cited always leave behind Many less highly “specialized” species when compared with the far Fewer number of relatively more highly specialized species? If a Designer is micromanaging the process, then why leave the majority of creatures “behind” as it were? Isnʼt that more a prediction of evolution than “design?” To put it another way: Why should a Designer require over two billion years simply to move from the earliest known Single-celled creature to the first Multi-cellular species? Why does a Designer require millions of years to produce human beings from their nearest cousins and also have to leave behind so many extinct primate species and then extinct hominid species in the process?

Top 3 Things About Evolution That Revolt Creationists The Most

I suspect thereʼs more than just logic behind the way some Christians react to the idea of evolution, thereʼs also a conscious or unconscious revulsion to common ancestry, THREE of them in fact:

Revulsion #1

“I ainʼt no Monkeyʼs Uncle!”

“1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of ‘You may believe that youʼre descended from monkeys, but I believe youʼre a creature of God.’ I guess that Buchanan hadnʼt considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including ‘monkeys.’ It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called ‘creationism’ is the feeling that somehow parts of Godʼs creation are not worthy of being our ancestors.”
Tom Scharle

However, Christians like C. S. Lewis were not threatened by the thought of a species of thinking religious animal:

“When the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man… it became abominable—a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have… and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost… the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.”
C. S. Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet (a Christian science-fiction novel)

And certain ironies arise from denying so vehemently that one is not a “Monkeyʼs Uncle,” while affirming that humanity was created from the “dust of the earth,” because, isnʼt it just as respectable to be a “modified monkey” as “modified dirt?” Or as Will Rogers put it during the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s:

“The Supreme Court of Tennessee has just ruled that you other states can come from whoever or whatever you want to, but they want it on record that they come from mud only!… William Jennings Bryan tried to prove that we did not descend from the monkey, but he unfortunately picked a time in our history when the actions of the American people proved that we did… Some people certainly are making a fight against the ape. It seems the truth kinder hurts. Now, if a man didnʼt act like a monkey, he wouldnʼt have to be proving that he didnʼt come from one. Personally I like monkeys. If we were half as original as they are, we would never be suspected of coming from something else. They never accuse monkeys of coming from anybody else… You hang an ape and a political ancestry over me, and you will see me taking it into the Supreme Court, to prove that the ape part is O.K., but that the political end is base libel… If a man is a gentleman, he doesnʼt have to announce it; all he has to do is to act like one and let the world decide. No man should have to prove in court what he is, or what he comes from. As far as Scopes teaching children evolution, nobody is going to change the belief of Tennessee children as to their ancestry. It is from the actions of their parents that they will form their opinions.”

Revulsion #2

“If you teach people theyʼre monkeys, theyʼll act like monkeys.”

A second revulsion is related to the question of the origin of ethical values. Ethical values like “forgiveness,” are assumed to be mysterious and sublime ideas that we owe primarily to a few millennia of Judeo-Christianity. However as Frans de Waal pointed out:

“Monkeys, apes, and humans all engage in reconciliation behavior (stretching out a hand, smiling, kissing, embracing, and so on), so such behavior is probably over thirty million years old, preceding the evolutionary divergence of these primates… Reconciliation behavior [is thus] a shared heritage of the primate order… When social animals are involved…antagonists do more than estimate their chances of winning before they engage in a fight; they also take into account how much they need their opponent. The contested resource often is simply not worth putting a valuable relationship at risk. And if aggression does occur, both parties may hurry to repair the damage. Victory is rarely absolute among interdependent competitors, whether animal or human.”
Frans De Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates (see also, Morton Hunt, The Compassionate Beast: What Science is Discovering About the Humane Side of Humankind; and, Alfie Kohn, The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life; and see especially the chapter on “Kindness” in de Waalʼs latest work, Our Inner Ape.)

“When Washoe [the chimpanzee] was about seven or eight years old, I witnessed an event that told about Washoe as a person, as well as causing me to reflect on human nature. [The account proceeds to describe the chimp island at the Institute for Primate Studies]…One day a young female by the name of Cindy could not resist the temptation of the mainland and jumped over the electric fence in an attempt to leap the moat. She hit the water with a great splash which caught my attention. I started running toward the moat intent on diving in to save her. [Chimps cannot swim.] As I approached I saw Washoe running toward the electric fence. Cindy had come to the surface, thrashing and submerging again. Then I witnessed Washoe jumping the electric fence and landing next to the fence on about a foot of bank. She then held on to the long grass at the waterʼs edge and stepped out onto the slippery mud underneath the waterʼs surface. With the reach of her long arm, she grasped one of Cindyʼs flailing arms as she resurfaced and pulled her to the safety of the bank…Washoeʼs act gave me a new perspective on chimpanzees. I was impressed with her heroism in risking her life on the slippery banks. She cared about someone in trouble; someone she didnʼt even know that well.”
Roger Fouts, “Friends Of Washoe” Newsletter

“We are told by those who assume authority in these matters, that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once a fertilized egg cell, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of the fertilized egg cell of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist, or the saint, to give up his endeavors to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of manʼs nature reveals, at its foundation, all the selfish passions, and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it? [As Mark Twain wrote, “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”] The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions without a momentʼs hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the “righteous overmuch.”
T. H. Huxley, Evidence As To Manʼs Place In Nature

Question: “If we think that we are just animals, wonʼt we behave like animals?”

Answer: “What animal species are you thinking of? Porpoises are gregarious, intelligent, and fun-loving. Baboons are protective of the young. They show cooperative group behavior. Gorillas are docile, family-oriented, and vegetarian. Chimpanzees form ‘bands’ of more than one family, while orangutans live alone. From an evolutionary viewpoint, natural selection has produced people who behave like people. Humans, like all other species, are unique. There is no reason why we should behave as if we were some other species… We are a highly social species. Most of our behavior is learned, not genetically determined. [Compare the behavior of a child who is raised by human beings, with one who is not raised by human beings, i.e., during the first few months or years of the childʼs life. Then you begin to realize how near to animals we really are, and what a large proportion of human behavior is learned during a long socialization process, which is itself the result of millions of years of cultural, merely biological evolution. [See Douglas K. Candlandʼs Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature.] We can learn behavior that will contribute to group well-being and our long-term survival as a species. We can even ‘unlearn’ whatever traces of instinctive behavior we may have inherited. Even if war between tribes is ‘natural’ human behavior, we can learn not to make war. Systems of morals and ethics serve, in part, to channel our behavior away from behavior that is socially and biologically destructive.”
William Thwaites, “Would We All Behave Like Animals?”

One irony of this particular revulsion is pointed out below:

“Creationists criticize evolutionists for the demeaning idea of ‘coming from apes’ and say that man is more noble than that, and then have sermons where man is called a miserable worm worthy to be burned eternally in hell.”
William Bagley

Also see The Moral Question and, How Atheists Ground Morality

Revulsion #3

“Do we have an eternal soul, or not? Animals donʼt.”

A third revulsion is related to the fact that animals die and we assume they never rise again, so if we are directly related to animals then maybe our lives will also cease with death:

“We do not like to be reminded of the ways in which we resemble animals. We sinners like to think our motives are more holy than those of animals. And since we generally assume animals cannot have eternal life with God, thinking about animal deaths and about our own place in nature frightens us.”

Ed Friedlander, Christian Perspectives On Evolution

A similar doubt is given expression within the pages of the Bible:

“I said to myself concerning the sons of men, God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath [‘…all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life’ Gen. 6:17; 7:15,22, both man and beasts] and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust [‘…till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’ Gen. 3:19]. Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?”
Ecclesiastes 3:18-21

And an irony of this revulsion is pointed out below:

“A preacher thundering from his pulpit about the uniqueness of human beings with their God-given souls would not like to realize that his very gestures, the hairs that rose on his neck, the deepened tones of his outraged voice, and the perspiration that probably ran down his skin under clerical vestments are all manifestations of anger in mammals. If he was sneering at Darwin a bit (one does not need a mirror to know that one sneers), did he remember uncomfortably that a sneer is derived from an animalʼs lifting its lip to remind an enemy of its fangs? Even while he was denying the principle of evolution, how could a vehement man doubt such intimate evidence?”
Sally Carrighar, Wild Heritage

“The Tyranny of Common Sense” & The “Mysterian” View of the Mind-Body Problem

The Questions Below Are From The Article, “The Tyranny of Common Sense” by the British philosopher David Papineau, author of The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability, and, Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford University Press).

To quote Papineau:

Philosophical conservatism is especially rife in one of my own specialties, the philosophy of mind. This is an area where there is plenty of scope to query common sense. Everyday thinking embodies a rich structure of assumptions about the mind, and it is by no means clear that all these assumptions are sound. In particular, there are many recent scientific findings that cast substantial doubt on our intuitive view of the mind. For a start, take Benjamin Libetʼs work on the genesis of actions. Libetʼs experiments indicate that, at least when it comes to basic bodily movements, our conscious choices occur a full third of a second after neural activity in the brain begins to prompt the behavior. This certainly casts doubt on our intuitive conviction that our actions are instigated by our conscious choices. Again, the work of David Milner and Melvyn Goodale on the separation of the dorsal and ventral streams in visual processing (the “where” and “what” streams) suggests that our basic bodily movements arenʼt guided by our conscious visual awareness but by some more basic mechanism. And then there are the many experiments on “change blindness”. These show that we often fail to see large visible changes occurring right in front of us, and so question the intuitive compelling idea that we are aware of pretty much everything within our field of vision.

However, when philosophers come across this kind of work, they donʼt view it as an exciting challenge to the everyday view of the mind. Rather, their first reaction is to distrust the interpretation of the scientific experiments. In their view, there is no way that our everyday view of the mind can be threatened by scientific findings. Our intuitive conception of the mind is sacrosanct, so there must be something wrong with scientific arguments that cast doubt on it.

Sometimes this resistance is rationalized by positing a principled distinction between “personal level” claims about the mind and “sub-personal” accounts of the mechanisms operating in the brain. The idea is that science can tell us about the sub-personal level, but the personal level is something that we need to find out about by commonsensical means. But this distinction seems a desperate device. Of course, there can be differences in the grain of different descriptions of any system, and we should not suppose that interesting claims about the parts will automatically translate into interesting claims about the whole. But we can agree about this without adopting the unmotivated and indefensible view that our intuitive large-scale picture of the mind is somehow insulated against any threat from scientific findings.

I myself have recently become interested in a rather different way in which recent scientific findings threaten to overturn our everyday view of the world. Here the evidence comes from quantum mechanics rather than psychological research…the full article appears in this monthʼs issue of The Philosophers Magazine

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Professor Colin McGinn is a fascinating British philosopher whose work focuses on philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophical logic. He was recently interviewed on Moyersʼs new program, Bill Moyersʼs on Faith and Reason, which can be seen here. As well as being interviewed by Jonathan Miller in the summer of 2003 for the series “Atheism - A Rough History Of Disbelief”, the transcript of which can be read here.

McGinn is the leading proponent of the “New Mysterianism”, namely, that a full understanding of the mind-brain identity might never be achieved. His classic paper on the topic is available online: McGinn, C. (1989), “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” One difficulty with solving the problem he mentions is that, “Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial processes; yet perception of the brain seems limited to revealing such processes.” McGinn also acknowledges a debt to Nagel who pointed out the ineffability of bat experience, which McGinn used as an analogy in his article. According to Nagel, we can never really grasp what itʼs like to be a bat; some aspects of bathood are, as McGinn might put it, perceptually closed to us. Now if all our ideas stemmed directly from our perceptions (as is the case for a ‘Humean’ mind), this would mean that we suffered cognitive closure [or blindness] in respect to some ideas (‘batty’ ones, we could say). Of course, weʼre not in fact limited to ideas that stem directly from perceptions; we can infer the existence of entities we canʼt directly perceive. But McGinn says this doesnʼt help. In explaining physical events, you never need to infer non-physical entities, and in analyzing phenomenal experience you never need anything except phenomenal entities. So weʼre stuck. (To quote someoneʼs analysis of McGinnʼs view.)

McGinn is also mentioned in the following online philosophy of mind articles:

Nicholson, Mr D.M. (2005) From a Flaw in the Knowledge Argument to a Physicalist Account of Qualia.

Lazarov, Georgi (2003) Materialism and the problem of consciousness: The aesthesionomic approach.

Nicholson, Dennis (2003) Solving the Mind-Body Problem - The Real Significance of the Knowledge Argument.

Carruthers, Peter (2002) Consciousness: explaining the phenomena. Naturalism, Evolution and Mind..

Harnad, Stevan (2001) Explaining the Mind: Problems, Problems. The Sciences.

Harnad, Stevan (2001) No Easy Way Out. The Sciences.

Carruthers, Peter (2000) The evolution of consciousness. Evolution and the human mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition.

Harnad, Stevan (2000) Correlation vs. Causality: How/Why the Mind/Body Problem Is Hard. Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Humphrey, Nicholas (2000) How to solve the mind-body problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Also of note is McGinnʼs university homepage which features a link to his online book, “Principia Metaphysica” that contains some intriguing paragraphs. McGinn seems to be aiming for a poetic form of philosophical discourse that sums up his view of life the universe and everything, but also recognizes the limitations of both philosophical language and human understanding. Note especially his mention of “intentionality” and “consciousness” in the final paragraph below:

23. I want to say outright that laws necessarily come before everything, even God—but that is not quite right (though sometimes hyperbole serves sobriety). It is as if the laws of the world were the first item on Godʼs agenda, and once they were settled a lot else was too. The laws that govern God are an embarrassment to him, like wearing a low-ranking uniform; he wishes he could throw them off. But without them he is nothing, a pure untrammeled ego, a frictionless point, a featureless receptacle—a metaphysical vacuum. The laws of God would apply to other gods with his nature; he is subsumed by his laws. The idea of the supernatural is not scientifically dubious; it is metaphysically incoherent. Any object consists of law-governed stuff—so where is there room for the supernatural (in the sense of an object subject to no law—or to “quasi-laws”)? Try to conceive of a universe in which every object is supernatural. Supernatural compared to what? We think we have the idea of the absolutely free agent, a pure lawless will, a nomologically transcendent I—but without laws there is no nature, and hence no object. Of course, there is no contradiction in the idea of another kind of stuff “ectoplasm”) subject to other types of law; but this is really the idea of another order of nature. No object could participate only in miracles, if a miracle is defined as an exception to natural laws. (A law is actually the nearest thing to a miracle that we have.)

24. Laws are produced by nothing but produce everything. Laws do not impose order on the world, as if the world were a disorderly place till they came along. Can you rely on laws of nature? Not as you rely on the word of a trusted friend. Laws are formative, not merely reliable or predictively useful. The sun may not rise tomorrow—it may be blown out of the sky by powerful aliens. But this is no abrogation of the laws of nature. To abrogate the laws of nature would be to have no sun to begin with. Obviously, laws do not govern the universe in the way a political party governs a country, and yet this dual use of “govern” invites illusions of independence. It would probably be best to re-invent our entire vocabulary for talking about laws.

25. “Laws + stuff = objects”: not such a bad way to put it. “Laws are made manifest in objects and events”: yes, but that doesnʼt mean they acquire reality that way. “Objects instantiate laws”: true, but not as objects instantiate predicates (one wants to make a distinction here between internal and external instantiation.) “Objects have laws running through them”: better, metaphorically—and how metaphorical is “instantiate” anyway? Compare: “objects ‘respect’ laws”.) If there were no laws, there would only be raw stuff—and that is impossible. Raw stuff is like the unarticulated given—a kind of contradiction. Stuff must come in the form of objects, as thoughts must come in the form of intentionality (rough analogy). Lawless stuff is like Jamesʼs “blooming, buzzing confusion”—a trick of language. Stuff, objects and laws come in a seamless package—as consciousness and intentionality do. There is no shaping of a pre-existing reality. (Remember that all analogies have their limitations.) Physical atoms are anything but formless; they are the parts of objects—not their stuff. Godʼs three major acts of creation—stuff, objects and laws—are really just one. Conceptual distinctions are not ontological distinctions.