Rational Philosophy

On the reproductive strategies of Komodo Dragons — what they tell us, and what they don’t. And a parallel in the trends of religious affiliation.

Neil Shubin, associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, tries to shrug off objections to cloning as “unnatural” by explaining that female Komodo Dragons, and other species, can reproduce without the need for male fertilization. Shubin reasons that this phenomenon, reported in Britain and Kansas, in which the offspring have identical DNA to the mother, shows that we’re on shaky ground if we turn to nature to determine that cloning is unnatural. Since nature can encompass all kinds of odd survival mechanisms, Shubin argues, when it comes to survival, “anything goes.” But in his rush to eliminate nature as an infallible moral compass (a sensible intent, since, as he says, only humans have a sense of morality) Shubin unfortunately shuffles out of the door the question of what’s “natural.”

Shubin’s argument goes like this: Cloning happens in nature (through the phenomenon of virgin births). Therefore cloning can’t be said to be unnatural.

He has, of course, stooped to a very basic form of sophistry by taking two different ideas and equating them. Virgin birth in Komodo Dragons has evolved over millions of years as a survival mechanism when male fertilization is unlikely or difficult. When humans clone a species we deliberately achieve our means with mechanisms that haven’t evolved. That’s the whole point of applying science to cloning — to hoodwink nature.

In amongst this sophistry though, Shubin points out that male fertilization persists as by far the most likely form of reproduction in Komodos, despite the possibility of virgin birth, because it mixes up the gene pool of the offspring and in so doing allows for adaptation. (Passing on the same genes makes adaptation impossible.)

“Without variation,” as Shubin notes, “the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges…”

This put me in mind of a new survey on religion from the Pew Forum. In its survey of over 35,000 Americans (a relatively large sample), Pew found that “more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all.” “The number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.”

I should quickly state that non-affiliated does not necessarily mean non-religious; overall about 10% claimed to be non-religious (1.6% atheist, 2.4% agnostic, and 6.3% secular unaffiliated).

I’ve spoken at length in other posts that statistics mislead and get misused. But here I want to say something that would, I believe, hold true even if the statistics told another story; it would just lead to a different prediction.

The decision to change one’s religious affiliation requires as a prerequisite some openness to the idea of change. In making such a change one must be prepared to let go of the old affiliation in favor of the new one. In this way the process is analagous to evolution. Just as the body of an organism responds to physical impulses, so, too, our consciousness responds to mental impulses. And just as the natural world would be static and unchangeable without variation, so, too, the world of ideas would be static and unchangeable without variation.

If we take the Pew statistics at face value, they indicate that the world of ideas has begun to bring about a move away from particular religious affiliation, particularly in young people. Depending on our own religious beliefs, we may wish this to be otherwise. But we cannot argue that the capacity for change, the flexibility and adaptability of beliefs is a healthy sign — it is the evolution of consciousness.

Now for the subjective, but rational, commentary: I am not surprised by the trend that is apparently revealed in the Pew survey. It tracks with similar surveys in Europe (although charting a less dramatic move toward secularism than Europe has seen). And it makes rational sense. Relgions started out as mechanisms by which people tried to make sense of the world. Inspired by doubt, wonder, and fear, early humans invested inanimate objects with the power of deities. Once these inanimate objects were more fully understood, the sense of the divine moved ever further from the tangible world until in more recent times it became invested in an unseen, unseeable, omnipotent but ultimately elusive deity (after all, what was left?)

The more people become aware and convinced that existence can be understood without recourse to a god, the more they will be to change and even let drop their religious affiliations.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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The Golden Compass, Dark Chocolate, Marijuana, and The Future of The Human Race.

When Google’s search engine trawls a website, its bot uses the first couple of sentences at the top of the post as an abstract. I just found this out. So, as of today, I will add a brief topic summary to the top of my posts. As always, I want to add value for you, the reader, so in the topic summary I’ll try to be at least descriptive, and perhaps even amusing.

BBC’s world service this morning interviewed Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, now a movie: The Golden Compass. Some have criticized Pullman for being atheistic and anti-religion. The American Catholic League has launched a national campaign encouraging people to boycott the film. Any “ism” can be criticized of course, and many can be problematic. But when asked about the controversy, Pullman gently steered the question toward one of rationality. Whether he is atheist or not, Pullman’s concern lies with the harm that organized religion can do when it meddles with politics and when politics uses religion as a rationale for war, murder and oppression. Pullman spoke with such sense and good intent that a national campaign in support of the film seems to be called for as an antidote to the actions of the American Catholic League.

Dark chocolate and marijuana, two guilty pleasures for many, both take a medical beating today. Beware of flavenolless impostors, we’re warned, when it comes to dark chocolate, and don’t eat too much. And for the pot-heads among us, it seems that marijuana, which constricts the blood vessels in the brain, may have long term ill effects on memory and the chances of a stroke. For anyone who knows a pot-head, of course, the news about long term effects comes as little surprise. It’s not that spacey, sieve-headed slackers (no offense intended) are drawn to the substance so much as it encourages these qualities in its partokers.

Where am I going? One more story will get us there.

The men’s satellite TV channel, Bravo, commissioned evolutionary theorist Dr. Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics to report on the future of the human race. Dr. Curry hypothesizes two mid and long-term shifts, the first a racial homogenization over the next 1,000 years, the second, in the 10,000 year time-frame, a split in the human race into two species, one talk, attractive, intelligent, graceful, and the other short, stupid, ugly and goblin-like. We can take heart in Dr. Oliver’s first prediction: Us men will be taller, more athletic looking, deeper-voiced, square-jawed and with bigger peckers. You gals will be wide-eyed, downy-skinned, pert-breasted… But watch out if you rely too much on technology, because 10,000 years on your heirs may be part of the underclass.

I warn my daughter about this when I’m helping her with her math homework. (Not the ultimate goblin-featured fate of her progeny, but the over-reliance on technology.) It’s a terrible thing. We don’t know how a sine function works. We don’t know how our cars work. We don’t know how our phones work, or the GPS devices that guide us from point A to point B. We don’t know how our HDTV works, or what HDTV is for that matter. Well, somebody knows, presumably, since it has been invented, trademarked, licensed and mass-produced, but most of us don’t.

But is Dr. Curry’s work conjecture or science? Is it prejudice wrapped as prescience?

We’ll never know. We’ll be long gone. But it strikes me (my own conjecture!) as sinister, mean-spirited, and downright pessimistic to predict that the long term effects of human consciousness will be to make one segment of the population more stupid. Being conscious and aware, we also have the capacity to self-monitor as a species, to detect our own over-reliance on technology and do something about it. If we can divert ourselves from the rocky shores of faux dark chocolate and pot smoke, we can surely counteract the dangers of technology.

I try to keep this in mind as I read about poor Robert Schoff, who made it to seventy seven years of age before suffering the indignity of spending his Christmas Eve stuck upside-down in the opening of his septic tank, feet waggling in the air. It would be uncharitable to dwell, as Dr. Curry might, on Mr. Schoff generous girth and diminutive stature (5-foot-5 and 135-pounds). His septic mishap notwithstanding, Mr. Schoff sounds like an eminently sensible man. He knew, after all, that he had a septic tank, that it was blocked, and how to unblock it. His fault lay not in his cognition, but in the execution of his plan.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

I didn’t post yesterday as I have pneumonia. I’ll try a quick post today because I’m feeling a little better, and because Mitt Romney’s speech on faith has me alarmed.

I highly recommend The NY Times editorial, Crisis of Faith, bravo. Of several pieces I’ve read it is the only one I’ve found that focuses on the distressing fact that Romney chose to make the speech in the first place. The rest seem to take it for granted that this kind of focus on religion is par for the course in a political race in America in 2007.

David Brooks, for instance, laments that Romney succeeded only in blurring the distinctions between faiths until one’s choice of religion may as well be a matter of picking “the one with the prettiest buildings?” I may be wrong, but Brooks seems almost offended that Romney didn’t rank religions by their degree of goodness.

As reported by CNN, Bill Bennett and Roland Martin debated the effectiveness of Romney’s speech; did it succeed in its political objectives. I can see how such inquiry can be of a certain amount of interest or even fascination, but if this is the primary level on which we judge such an event, surely there is a bigger problem.

As the Times editorial points out, Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And yet this is exactly what is happening in politics today. Romney succumbed to pressure to take such a test. Other candidates are doing the same thing. The general media implicitly or explictly supports or condones such tests in all manner of ways ranging from allowing an explicitly religious test to be posed as a question in a debate, to focusing political commentary on the content or success of a candidate’s religious posturing rather than questioning why the candidate is posturing.

If you have the stomach for it, you can listen to Romney’s speech or read a transcript via NPR.

Everything that’s wrong about Romney’s speech is contained within it. He equates freedom with religion, for instance, and states that freedom is given by God, the Creator. He refers sarcastically to ‘enlightenment’ in Europe as if it is intrinsically a bad thing. He tries to concretize a definition of America as a religious nation.

The phenomenon of religious sway in America and the stranglehold it has on so many matters of national importance can be tied, I think, to a culture of isolationism and fear. America has yet to accomplish freedom from religion because too many of those with influence, in society and in government, fear the ramifications of such freedom and believe that America is right in clinging to the notion that God somehow looks down with favor on it.

Then is this freedom? Hasn’t religion now become a constraint?

Religion is humankind’s way of trying to conceive of where we came from. Religious faith is humankind’s way of holding on to an idea of where we came from in the face of obstacles to that idea.

Religion began as a natural and imaginative way for people to explain certain things that seemed inexplicable. The earliest religions focused on things such as the heavenly bodies (one could say that worshipping the sun comes closer to revering the source of life than any other religion!) or the spirits of the earth. As our scientific understanding of the world improved the basis for religious understanding receded ever further from the realm of everyday life, into something quite nebulous and remote.

This is the philosophical aspect to the piece: Religion cannot be supported logically or rationally. There are those who would rebutt that neither can atheism or agnosticism. I would beg that there is a difference. If we take as a ground for our awareness of our existence the input of our senses, we can build up a picture of the world as we perceive it from entirely logical and rational principles without ever calling upon the need for a god or creator. I cannot prove that there is no god, but I can demonstrate, logically and rationally, to my own satisfaction that my place in the world and the way the world works (even the way religions function) can be understood without calling upon some divine creator.

I’m alarmed by Romney’s speech because this culture of religion and its clamor will hold America back, and will continue to cause harm in the world in the name of good. As long as America defines itself as a religious nation, it will continue to spawn and support crusades, both here at home and abroad. It will further isolate America from the rest of the world. And it will perpetuate the religious moralizing that prevents politicians from making perfectly sound decisions because they’re afraid to stand up to the zealots in the community.

Some days I sit down to write and have no idea what I might write about. Today I sat down with a couple of ideas (to work on the moral problems posed by the plotline of the movie Gone, Baby Gone, and another good idea that now escapes me), but found myself instead reading an opinion piece by Stanley Fish - Suffering, Evil and The Existence of God.

Fish’s piece is inspired by a look at two new books, only one of which addresses Suffering and Evil as they pertain to the Existence of God — Bart D. Ehrman’s “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” The other Antony Flew’s “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” instead forwards the theory that “the only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind.”

Let’s tackle these two challenges in reverse order:

Flew makes the point that since science deals with chemicals and material stuff any answer it gives about meaning and purpose is insufficient. Or, as he would have put it when still an atheist the answer that “the laws of physics are ‘lawless laws’ that arise from the void – end of discussion” simply leaves open the question of from whence those laws arose. But here Flew has erred on two critical points.

1. The laws of physics are both self-consistent and consistent with logic and reason. The laws of physics arise out of the nature of this existence, not out of a void. (And therefore the concepts of our existence preceded and reveal themselves through the specific appearance of this space and this time.)

2. The principles of existence can and do provide a fully rational explanation for “the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see on earth.”

The principles of existence in space and time give us the principle of persistence — something that tends to continue to exist will tend to persist. (This is not a tautology, but a very simple reflection of a universal logical principle.) An example: Although there are many kinds of fundamental particles, only protons and electrons exist freely in any abundance. This is because protons and electrons, unlike their heavier sibling particles, have effectively infinite lifespans. This is why the material of the universe consists of atoms (electrons, protons, and neutrons — which are stable in bound form).

Living creatures embody an end-directed form because this is the form that survives. Any number of chemical reactions and interreactions can and do take place in a primordal soup, but the ones that aren’t persistent go nowhere.

Life seems so mysteriously purpose-driven because we’re looking at it backwards. What we don’t immediately perceive are all of the unproductive nubs and dead-ends (think dinosaurs). When we look for meaning, it helps to reflect that the meaning of life derives from process of its unfolding.

(All of this is explained much more fully in my book - “LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.”)

But what then is the purpose of suffering and evil?

It’s easier to dispense with evil. The concept of evil reflects a perception that someone or something wishes to hurt, harm or destroy for the simple purpose of hurting, harming or destroying. This practical definition of evil proves quite useful. Evil stands in opposition to a natural goal of life (that it should persist). Evil then arises from an unproductive genetic branch or from circumstances that warp a person’s psychological makeup. It serves no ultimate positive purpose, but provides great fodder for psychological dramas and political speeches.

Oddly, suffering does serve a purpose and seems to be an inevitable part of life. At the most immediate level, our bodies use suffering as an effective means of prompting us to act. Hunger pangs cause us to want to eat and thereby sustain our body with food. Pain from our nerve endings causes us to avoid doing things or continuing to do things that will harm us (and ultimately perhaps cause us not to survive). Even emotional anguish serves to provide us with a context for acting in ways that will help us survive or help our social group survive.

Does art (any kind of art — painting, sculpture, literature, music…) serve a purpose? And if so, what is that purpose? Why do we create art? And must the judgment of art be entirely subjective?

On Sunday, I visited the Brooklyn Book Festival. One of the booths housed The Aesthetic Realism Foundation. (I misread the sign at first and thought it said Atheistic Realism — this brought me up short. But even after I’d read it correctly I stayed to ask what Aesthetic Realism is.) Aesthetic Realism proposes that we can better understand our lives through the application of aesthetic principles. The booth staffer gave the example of the aesthetic practice of balancing heavy and light — being aware of the need for this balance in life can come through an understanding of its balance in art.

To me, this approach seems fascinating and insightful (and very worthy of the foundation’s efforts — for instance, they are hosting a forum on the social and personal value of Rock ‘n Roll, how cool is that?), but completely backwards philosophically; wherefrom do aesthetic principles derive if not from life?

When we ask whether art serves a purpose we ask a conceptual question. Can we relate art to a concept or set of concepts, and do these concepts give us insight into art’s possible purpose?

The answer to the first part of this question seems obvious if we think about who creates art — primarily people (and some particularly intelligent animals — larger primates and elephants). Since art requires the abstraction of ideas or impulses, it requires a conceptual process (whether subconscious or conscious). Without the product of the artistic process, which is not itself but what it represents, we have no art, therefore art relates to a set of concepts.

And herein, I believe, we have the answer to the second part of our question: The concept to which art consistently relates is abstraction! (This would still apply to representational art, in which the artist abstracts the idea or impulse of what he or she observes and transfers it to the medium of their choosing in a representational manner.)

And we also now have a clue as to a possible purpose of art. If art rests on the concept of abstraction of an idea or impulse. The artistic urge is the urge to abstract an idea or impulse. What is to be gained by acting on this urge?

Does the artist gain anything from acting on the urge? Do others gain anything from the result of the abstraction?

If we again go back to the concepts we can delve further into the concept of abstraction. Abstraction is the recreation of certain elements in another form. Abstraction is a form of reduction or refocusing. It draws out and emphasizes some aspects of the original idea or impulse.

We can say that the product of the artistic process aims to communicate this refocusing. It communicates the artist’s particular point of view on the idea or impulse. And these ideas or impulses similarly become concepts or representations themselves as they are abstracted.

If it is successful, art helps us better understand the world around us and ourselves. The more successful it is at aiding this understanding, the more valuable it is.

Hence, we have a dilemma. Art that is derivative and of little deep value in helping us better understand life’s complexities may still have mass appeal (most pop music). Whereas art that delves deeply and profoundly into complex matters may have very limited appeal.

Does the value multiply out over the number of people affected? Can an equation be drawn this simply?

More for later!