That Government Which Governs Least

"That government is best which governs least," first quoted in the United States Magazine in 1837 and the opening argument of Thoreau's 1849 Civil Disobedience, has been often quoted ever since, usually in arguing against a proposed new power of government.  The Republicans especially have used it against what they see as increasing government interference in our freedoms.

It is important, however, to examine Thoreau's expansion of the thought.  When all the citizens accept responsibility for the society they create, they will not need a government at all.  But Thoreau saw that many people had not evolved to this point - they "were not prepared for it," as he put it.  Until then, government is a necessary evil - an expedient (though he notes that most are inexpedient).  I submit that we still have not reached this Utopian state of society, and we never will.  Until the Singularity occurs and we can all relax into the protective arms of our robotic masters, we will have to govern ourselves as best as we can.  Still, most of us humans - and especially I think Americans - long for a world without so much bureaucracy and so many rules.

What strikes me when I hear this quote or its concept invoked, is that so often it's used on the wrong side of the issue.  Gay marriage is a perfect example.  Opponents say that government (especially the judicial branch in this case) is interfering with traditional marriage and we need laws like DOMA to protect it.  I want to ignore the pros and cons of gay marriage for now (perhaps in a later rant).  But isn't passing laws to give the government the power to tell you who you can and can't marry just such an expansion of government power into our lives, depriving a large proportion of citizens of one of their freedoms?

Abortion bans, another hot-button Conservative issue, continue to pour out of the new Republican Congress.  This is another example of new laws to take away a freedom that Americans have - I can't say enjoyed, but certainly exercised freely - for a half century.

So are prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, costing the Country over a trillion dollars since Nixon declared his War on Drugs.  Nearly 3% of all Americans are either incarcerated, on parole, or in probation.  Taking away a citizen's right to take drugs takes away some of his freedom, and it creates a vast bureaucracy.  Yet many Conservatives support these laws.

In all three of these cases, the actions to be prohibited have no direct effect on the voter.  These laws do not make you safer.  They do nothing to increase your own freedom or advance your pursuit of happiness.  If you disapprove of these actions, don't marry someone of your sex, don't have an abortion, and don't take drugs.  You have that freedom.  But you are not affected in any way if a lesbian couple marries, a woman has an abortion, or somebody gets high (DUI will always remain a required law).  Yet conservative voters consistently vote for more government and less freedom.

Wouldn't it be better to not pass new restrictive laws and repeal those already on the books?  No, we're not yet Thoreau's perfect society that can do away with government.  But can't we let people make their own decisions about their own lives, especially when those decisions do nothing to lessen our own freedoms?  Marriage (gay or otherwise), abortion, and drug use are all complex and serious issues, with huge effects on the lives of those engaging in them.  Many people make terrible mistakes.  People should be thoroughly informed of the pros and cons of each choice, and competent and unbiased advisors should be readily available to help people make those decisions.  Each person's conscience should be their guide.  But get government the hell out of the way.

If you're going to use Thoreau's quotations for your argument, I suggest this one:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.” 

Religion vs Science

Religion vs Science

It is a common meme, especially among those who believe in one or more gods (hereafter referred to as believers) that science "has it in" for religion, that the scientific establishment is actively opposing the religious establishment or its beliefs.  This idea is completely false.  Many scientists are believers and no scientific journal has ever published a paper attacking religion.  No scientist has claimed that he can prove that God exists or does not exist.  God's existence remains completely unverifiable (by either school of thought), and therefore by definition it is not a subject for science.  If you define religion (or just your faith) as a belief in God, then science has no opinion on the matter.

However, if your faith depends on (or even includes) the literal truth of the Bible, Koran, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita or any of the thousands of other allegedly sacred writings (hereafter referred to as the Bible), then science can and does conflict with your religious beliefs.  Again, no scientific paper attacks these beliefs directly.  For example, I have never seen a paper in a peer-reviewed journal that said "Genesis never happened."  Science isn't concerned with the Bible, so it doesn't address it, much less attack it.

Long ago, before the age of science and reason (and even later for Mormons and Moonies), people had no way to understand the world around them.  Everything was inexplicable.  What are the stars, sun, moon, and planets, and why do they move as they do?  What causes thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eruptions, disease, accidents, weather?  Why do bad things (disease, accidents, natural disasters, death, etc.) happen to us?  Why is the world as it is; how did it arise and what will happen to it in the future?  What happens to us after we die?  What is the best way to live?  Do we have free will, or are we helpless bumps on the karmic log?  What rules govern our existence?  These are huge questions, and everyone would like to know the answers.  But how could they possibly be answered?  It seemed impossible for people to ever find out.  And all over the world, people did the only thing they could: they guessed.  They made up answers.

Since it was obvious that people didn't make the world and couldn't create or prevent celestial events and natural disasters, someone else must have - someone immensely more powerful.  If we don't understand life and death and chance and fate, someone else far wiser must.  So people invented gods and myths.  What is thunder, you ask?  Why it's made by Zeus or Jupiter or Thor or any of several hundred other versions of a god who makes thunder.  Why does the moon change phases?  Simple, it's one of the moon gods.  What causes earthquakes?  No problem - a god of the underground is restless.  What happens after we die?  We go to a better place where there are no diseases or accidents and everybody's happy.  Or we come back and have another life.  Or we become one with the gods.  Where did the world come from?  The gods made it.  How should we behave?  The way the gods tell us to.  Every question is answered, nothing left out, no reason to wonder any longer.  It was the perfect (and only available) solution.

And it worked, in every society in the world.  People were happy to have all their questions answered.  They loved their gods and creation myths, and they came to define that culture.  We, and only we, are the chosen people, the ones created by and beloved by (our) god.  We are the ones who obey his laws, and everyone else in the world does not.  The others are wrong - perhaps just mis- or un-informed, but perhaps evil because they don't believe in the true god.  The only downside was that every culture developed its own myths and gods and they were mutually exclusive.  Each god declared that their way was right and all others wrong.  This resulted in uncountable wars and genocides, which continue today.  Still, a small price to pay for the satisfaction and security of knowing the answers to everything.

Then, probably around 1600 BC in Egypt, another method of finding answers was developed.  It started in medicine.  Doctors would try a treatment on an ailing person, then wait to see what effect it had.  If nothing happened or the condition got worse, they would try something else.  Writing was developed about this some time, so we have records of those early experiments.  A few centuries later in Mesopotamia, people began carefully measuring the motions of the heavenly bodies and recording their observations.  They discovered that it wasn't random motions, but repeating patterns.  You didn't need gods and myths to predict eclipses, for instance.

The Greeks codified the new method of learning about the world, and called it science.  Faith was not required.  Someone proposed an explanation for some phenomenon, just as they had always done with religion, but then you tested it with experiments carefully designed to eliminate error.  If you thought you had proved (or disproved) a theory, you told others about it and they repeated the experiment.  If they could not, you did more experiments to see which of you had made the mistake.  When an experiment could be repeated by anyone and they all got the same results, everyone knew that the right answer had been found.  It didn't matter what you believed, what religion you were, what culture or continent or era you inhabited.  If anyone didn't believe it, you could do the experiment with them and prove them wrong.  Any high school class can prove the truth of evolution or the atomic theory or relativity.   It was no longer a guess or an opinion or dogma - it was simply true.

The new method fairly quickly started running up against religious dogma, and the religious establishments, seeing how the irresistible power of logic and reason threatened their holy scriptures, fought long and bitterly to suppress science.  For fifteen hundred years, the Catholic Church held back any advance in knowledge, while Asian, Semitic, and American civilizations quickly surpassed the Europeans in their understanding of the world around us.  When the Enlightenment started to liberate European minds, however, that culture made stunning strides in pushing back the domain of superstition.  Men could make and understand thunder and lightning, calculate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, peer into the distant past and future, and begin to understand our place in the universe.

The answers poured in: no, God didn't make the universe four thousand years ago - it was created 13.8 billion years ago; no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth - it's the other way round; no, supernatural magic doesn't exist - not one example of miracle, extrasensory perception, communicating with the dead, prescience, ghost, or soul has ever been detected in a verifiable setting; no, God didn't make all the animals at once - species are constantly going extinct and changing into other forms.  No, it does not require a creator to create all the complexity and beauty we see all around us.  Every time there was a religious belief or given truth that could be tested, hundreds and thousands of cases, science won every time.  Not once did religion win by proving science wrong.  Religion doesn't work that way.  You believe it because you believe it and it can't be proven right or wrong.  But if your religion makes some statement, and that fact can be tested, religion always loses.  We know, with 100% certainty, that Genesis is wrong.  Those events never occurred, and we can prove it.

In the face of all this new evidence, believers have become divided.  Some cling tenaciously to their beliefs, insisting that their scriptures are the word of God and every word is literally true.  As the evidence continues to mount, this position becomes harder and harder to hold.  It means shoving your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to any argument (or read any book), saying, "No, No!" with no argument to back it up.  Millions of fundamentalists all over the world are doing this right now.  But as knowledge of the world and the obvious effectiveness and correctness of scientific knowledge disseminate through our global culture and technology, surely this irrational backlash will eventually subside.

Other believers simply retract the borders of the realm of religion.  Sure, science is right about cosmology and physics and geology and evolution.  That was a bunch of creation myths those old guys believed in that somehow got into the Bible.  The real story is that God is real, He loves us and listens to our prayers and we'll get to meet Him after we die.  Science can never touch that faith.

In a way they are correct.  No scientist will ever prove that God does not exist or that there is no afterlife.  There is not one iota of evidence for these beliefs, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees so concisely put it.  But science has a remarkable record of being right about the world.  We have spacecraft on other planets and GPS here only because both relativity and quantum mechanics can be written down as mathematical formulae and solved.  If those principles - or any of the knowledge that supports them - were wrong, these things would not be possible.

If you made a table of reasons to believe or not believe in God, 100% of all experiments, physical data, and known facts would be against it.  No experiment has ever confirmed a religious idea.  There is no evidence that prayers work or believers have better lives than non-believers; that miracles occur, now or in the past; or that there is a heaven, hell, or any other kind of afterlife.  On the other side of the ledger, what reasons are there for ignoring 100% of the evidence and believing in a God that can never be proven?  There is only one, and it is so glaringly obvious it constantly astounds me that many believers seem to have never thought of it.  We want to believe.  It feels good to believe that there's a powerful, beneficent being who understands all the strange and terrible things that happen in the world; that loves and values us; that our lives have a larger meaning than just procreating and dying; that we will live again after our deaths and be again among the loved ones we lost.  God has a plan, and he has rules to live by.  We don't have to wonder what's right and wrong, whether what we're doing could have terrible and even fatal results - it's all in the book.  We're not confused and scared and unsure aging adults - we're children, guided and loved and protected by a caring, wise, and all-powerful father.  If you were trying to make up a happy comforting myth, you would make up exactly this one.  And we did.

Of course, there is another powerful reason to believe in a religion.  It's what is taught to us as children.  As we start to learn about the world as infants, we turn to our parents to provide the knowledge.  They teach us so much - how to behave with others, how to avoid getting injured, how to dress and talk and eat.  Most of what we know we learned from them.  And when they teach us their religion, of course we accept that too as truth.  Why should we doubt them, when they have been so reliable in every other way?  So all over the world, children grow up in their parents' religion, and they pass it on to their children.  If you had been born in Iraq, do you really think you would not be Muslim?  No one reasons their way to religion.  The number of people who come to religion as adults or who change religions (other than for a marriage or to avoid discrimination) is vanishingly small.  And where scientific knowledge is readily available and there is freedom of thought, even people raised in a religious upbringing frequently abandon it.

To my mind that's the distinction between atheists and believers.  Some of us want to know what the world is really like and turn to impartial science for our answers.  Knowledge allows us to take an active part in shaping the world - to try to avert climate change for instance, or plagues or mass extinctions or depletion of resources or avoiding a comet impact.  Believers would rather not know the facts because they'd rather feel safe.  They truly believe that what you don't know can't hurt you - one of the silliest and most demonstrably, dangerously incorrect aphorisms ever created.

Noah

Noah

I see there's a new biblical epic movie out about Noah.  I don't intend to see it, because I am pre-judging it.  I can assume that because it was made in America, it will not dare to present the story as an exciting fairy tale, but will pander to the evangelical Christians and include all the divine miracles.

Normally I abhor prejudice and try to avoid it, but with this film I feel safe in assuming that I would hate it.  This is because it is about the Noah story, and of all the biblical fables, it is the most absurd and demonstrably false.  Let me count the ways:

First, God caused the flood because every single person - man, woman, child, and infant, except Noah's immediate family - had offended Him and fell short of His requirements and therefore deserved death.  Well, He created them complete with all their desires, strengths, and weaknesses, so all their actions and failures are by definition His fault.  Also, He is omniscient, so He knew before He created them exactly what they would do.  So why should He be surprised, much less offended?  And if He wanted to punish all those millions of people, why not just kill them?  Why have a flood?  Knock them on the head and be done with it.

Second, except for the animals saved in the ark, the flood presumably killed every terrestrial animal on Earth, plus all the birds and insects (they could not stay aloft for the six or twelve months the flood endured).  These billions of creatures were presumably blameless, but God destroyed them as well.  He is omnipotent - why didn't He just strike down those who offended Him?

Third, Genesis 7:19-20 says: "All the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered.  Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail and the mountains were covered."  Fifteen cubits is about 23 feet - so clearly 23 feet of water wouldn't have covered even the smallest hill.  The only way to make sense of this is if the water covered the highest mountain by 23 feet.  The highest mountain is Mount Everest at 29,029 feet, so we have an accurate figure for the depth of the water - 29,052 feet, or five and a half miles above normal sea level.  This is an increase of a billion cubic miles of water - immensely more water than exists on the whole Earth, but never mind - He can do anything.  It rained for forty days, so that's 726 feet of rain a day, or an inch of rain landing every two seconds, over the whole surface of the Earth, non-stop for forty days.  Never mind that a rainfall that hard would have pounded the ark and its crew to jelly.

Fourth, raising sea level by five and a half miles would kill all marine plants and animals that depend on the shore or the bottom.  Even the incredibly hardy animals that live at the bottom of the trenches would have been crushed by nearly doubling the pressure.  Also, all that fresh water would have diluted the sea to the point that it would be essentially a brackish world.  All the animals in the ocean would have died in days, as would the freshwater species.  Too bad He didn't suggest a few saltwater tanks in the ark to hold all the whale sharks, blue whales, and giant squid.

Fifth, the ark itself.  It is to be built of gopher wood.  There is not now, nor was there in ancient times, any tree by that name.  Gophers are North American animals and were not known to the Jews.  When Noah took his shopping list down to his local Home Depot, he must have had some trouble filling the order.  Supposedly he substituted some other wood and hoped God wouldn't notice.  Whatever he used, there must have been a lot of it, because the ark was huge - 450' long by 75' wide by 45' deep - larger than any other ship built until around 1900.  It would have rated a cargo tonnage of about 12,000.  A lot of work for one guy and his kids.  A hull of that size would require vast engineering knowledge, unlikely for a goatherd.

Sixth, those animals.  Even a 12,000-ton ship could never hold two of every kind of animal known to the Jews - elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, lions, tigers, snakes, etc.  Then there are all the animals they didn't know about but must have somehow rounded up anyway (because they survived the flood) - water buffaloes, bison, kangaroos, wallabies, grizzly bears, platypi, gorillas, condors, yaks, etc. etc.  Then there are ten to twenty million species of insects - over 350,000 species just of beetles.  The beetles alone would have buried the ark in a huge mound.  As for bacteria and viruses, no one has even estimated their number of species.  Still, Noah and his boys must have rounded up a couple of every single one.

Seventh, the plants.  Being submerged under five miles of brackish water for half a year would have killed all the land plants.  The Bible simply ignores their problems and what the survivors would have eaten after the flood.  Did they have two of every plant in there as well - redwood trees and all?

Eighth, Genesis 8:3-4 states: "And the waters returned from off the earth continually; and after the end of one hundred and fifty days the waters decreased.  And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month upon the mountains of Ararat."  Now Ararat is 16,854' high, so the water had receded from 29,209' to 16,854', or 12,355' in that time - about 82' a day, or 77 cubic miles of water every second.  Where did all those billion cubic miles of water go?  It can't have run off anywhere because it was already covering the ocean.  It can't have evaporated because the atmosphere can't hold that amount of water,

So, for all the above reasons and hundreds more, the story of Noah's flood cannot be true, even allowing for miracles, blind faith, and an omnipotent God.  There are scores of similar examples in the Bible.  If there is a grain of truth in it, some village was probably devastated by a flood and many people died.  The old tale was used by the authors of the Bible to keep people in line - if you don't do what God wants, he can kill you, so be good for goodness' sake.  Like Paul Bunyan and Little Red Riding Hood, this is a fairy tale.  It was made up by ignorant camel herders, just like the tall tales and creation myths of every other culture in the world,  Anyone who thinks it is factual does not live in the real world.

Trust me.  Skip the movie.

Deregulation

One of the hot-button topics for the Republican/Tea Party candidates is deregulation. Government is too big, they say. There are too many regulations keeping business handcuffed. If government would get out of the way, businesses would be more profitable, hire more people, and the economy would flourish. If it’s good for business, it’s good for the country. And if a company is too greedy or provides bad service or causes harm, free and open competition will drive them out of business. The market is self-regulating – dwindling sales will eliminate crooks and swindlers. At first hearing it makes sense. Who wants to be regulated? Who wants the government telling them what they can and can’t do?



Well, the experiment has been tried. In 1978, the airline industry was deregulated. Prices and routes would no longer be set by the government. The FCC still enforces air safety, but the industry itself is free to act as it pleases. What was the result? First, most long distance flights were eliminated. They are the most costly to run, so most airlines went to a hub and spoke arrangement. If you want to fly from San Francisco to New York on Delta, you fly to their hub in Atlanta and connect from there to New York. Yes, it takes longer, uses more fuel, and requires long layovers in airport terminals, forcing you to buy expensive food. Many smaller third-tier cities simply lost their air service entirely. Second, services were curtailed – no more cooked meals delivered to your seat, more crowded seating, longer layovers, more lost baggage. Most airline employees – everyone from mechanics to pilots - suffered longer hours, fewer benefits, and large pay cuts. The employees had little recourse. Their unions were severely weakened. When the air traffic controllers went on strike, President Reagan simply fired them all and hired “replacement officials.” Third, with few bureaucratic hoops to jump through, scores of new start-up airlines popped up, offering cheap fares and no-frills service. There was huge turmoil throughout the industry. Many of the dominant players, some of whom had founded the industry – Eastern, Pan Am, TWA, Continental – went bankrupt, along with more than a hundred of the newer airlines like Braniff and Midway and America West, putting tens of thousands out of work.



Another example of deregulation is the thrift industry. Thrifts, or Savings and Loans, were created in the 19th century, first in Britain and then in the US. The idea was to encourage people to save by paying them interest on their savings deposits, and then using the money to fund loans for buying homes. It allowed people to grow their savings, get some income, and buy their own homes. Most S&L’s were originally non-profit organizations, similar to credit unions, set up to benefit their members by pooling their resources. Because of the number of people who lost all their savings in bank failures during the depression, federal regulations were set up to keep the thrift industry separate from the banks. They allowed the S&L’s to pay interest on deposits, which banks could not, but not to offer checking accounts. S&L’s could offer only savings accounts and home loans. But with the rise of new products services such as certificates of deposit, electronic funds transfers, IRA’s, and ATM’s – together with skyrocketing interest rates (some CD’s in the 70’s were paying more than 20% APR) – both industries were under enormous competitive pressure and urged deregulation. In two acts in 1980 and 1982, the government deregulated both industries, essentially eliminating any distinctions. S&L’s could offer NOW accounts, from which a consumer could write a Negotiable Order for Withdrawal and give it to another person to allow them to withdraw the money from their account – identical to a check. Banks could pay interest, sell insurance, offer brokerage services and investment products. As with airlines, hundreds of new start-up financial institutions popped up. But without government oversight and auditing, many were soon on the ropes. Most turned to offering investment products that were little more than Ponzi schemes. As long as more customers kept opening more accounts, the company could pay the interest. But as with all Ponzi schemes, the number of gullible victims dried up, and institutions began to fail in record numbers. In only a few years, 747 thrifts – 25% of the industry – went bankrupt. To avoid having hundreds of thousands lose their savings and/or homes, the government stood by its deposit insurance, costing the taxpayers $88 billion dollars, one of the major causes of the soaring national deficit of the early nineties. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs.

Then there was a second deregulation of the financial industry in the 1990’s. For the first time banks were allowed to operate across state lines, driving out of business hundreds of small-town community banks and forcing consumers to deal with far-off industrial giants. The agencies that monitored investment banking products were eliminated, in spite of strident objections from economic analysts and consumer advocates, leading to under-collateralized mortgage-based securities, derivatives products, hedge funds, and automated trading. Mortgage brokers and lenders were allowed and encouraged to write loans for people who could not reasonably expect to repay them. Homeowners’ mortgages were sold, repackaged, and sold again, to the point that foreclosures become a game of trying to find who actually holds the mortgage in a screen of false companies, fake boards, and non-existent holding companies. Again, with no one to stop them, greed drove the giant investment banks to offer products and services they knew were unsafe, and the Great Recession is the direct result. To date, more than three million American families have lost their homes and five million more are underwater and behind on their payments. Six and a half million have lost their jobs.

So the evidence is that Adam Smith was dead wrong.  Left to their own devices, the market does not self-monitor or self-regulate.  The free market does not eliminate ruthless and unethical practices, it fosters them - until the industry’s greed drives it over a cliff. And it does nothing to protect the consumer. The common and beloved image of free enterprise is of the bold entrepreneur, the determined inventor, the business that a couple of guys start in their garage, the family farmer, the hopeful young couple who open a restaurant, the older folks who run a neighborhood grocery store. But all these are a disappearing breed. As with gambling, advocates can always point to the tiny majority who strike it rich. But the vast majority fail – crushed by unregulated competition from big agro, big oil, big pharma, big box stores. Without a disinterested party to look over its shoulder, to curtail dishonest practices and unfair competition, to ensure a level playing field - someone whose only interest is protecting the consumer or the environment or the employee, unregulated business will work to grow its bottom line at the expense of its employees, its customers, the environment, the planet's health, and anything else that stands in its way.

And speaking of the environment (without which we will all die), who else but government will protect it? Industry had no incentive to protect it – there’s no profit in it and it can be more expensive to operate in a sustainable way. There didn't use to be environmental regulations – and the air became unhealthy to breathe, the waterways were poisonous, rivers caught fire, the ozone layer was punctured, fisheries collapsed, people in Los Angeles couldn't see across the street, topsoil eroded, toxic and radioactive waste was dumped in poor neighborhoods, asthma skyrocketed, and forests were destroyed. Even when it was clear to everyone that we were being poisoned, industry did nothing to change its practices. Then in 1970, over fierce Republican and industry opposition, the EPA was formed. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 established standards and gave the government the power to enforce them. The effects are remarkable and immediately obvious to anyone who lived in America before and after the passage of these acts. An independent study of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act alone estimated that during the year 2010 the law cost $27 billion to enforce but saved $110 billion in health care costs, avoided 23,000 premature deaths, 1.8 million illnesses, four million lost work days, and 31 million restricted activity days due to air pollution. So it saves us almost one hundred billion dollars a year, saves tens of thousands of lives, and makes us more productive and healthier. That’s one amendment to one environmental law, which like all environmental regulations, was bitterly opposed by the affected industries.

Which brings us to climate change. Anyone who tells you that human-caused climate change is not a proven fact is either misinformed or lying. There is no debate on the subject among the people who have spent years studying the issues and gathering data. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a non-partisan multinational panel made up of the leading scientists and advisors from one hundred and twenty countries, determined that climate change is real, is happening already, is accelerating, and is caused by human activities such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. Five years ago, more than 1,500 of the most senior scientists from sixty-three countries, including more than half of all living Nobel Laureates, signed an unequivocal statement that said “Let there be no doubt about the conclusions of the scientific community: the threat of global warming is very real and action is needed immediately. It is a grave error to believe that we can continue to procrastinate. Scientists do not believe this and no one else should either.” Yet industry and its apologists, primarily Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, continue to assert that the issue is controversial, not proven, and a subject of debate in the scientific community. These are lies. These are the same companies that polluted whole countries and decimated fisheries and forests and bitterly fought government “interference.” Now they would rather have the ecosystem collapse, rising sea levels inundate whole countries, and disrupt weather patterns, rather than allow government (which is after all, us) to regulate their harmful activities. This, to put it mildly, is criminal madness.

Heaven

According to Gallup, more than 80% of Americans believe in heaven.  To me, that's about the same as believing there are monsters under your bed.  I mean, do they think about what it could be like?  It's usually pictured with a bunch of folks in white robes sitting on clouds playing harps.  Who wants to play a harp all the time?  How many of those 257 million people have ever played a harp, or ever wanted to?  And not just for a couple of hours, but all the time, every minute, for the rest of time.  It's stupid.  Who could possibly want that, much less believe such an obviously My Little Pony kind of dream world?  Do grown-up, intelligent people really think that's where they want to be?

Okay, so that's the cartoonists' view of heaven, but it's absolutely the only one you ever see pictured - I know of no other image.  For a place that's the ultimate goal, the entire reason to be religious, it's funny no one even talks about what it looks like.  If you ask a believer, they get all funny and defensive.  It's a question you're not supposed to ask, and for a very good reason - all the answers are silly.

I can hear believers say, no, that's the simple view for the simple people - heaven is just the place where all good souls go after death.  Your spirit hangs out with your friends and ancestors and departed family members.  But that's not what the Bible says; it says you will be resurrected in the flesh.  Which flesh?  The cells in your body are replaced every seven to ten years, so no matter how long you've lived, most of you is less than ten years old.  Are you raised from the dead as you are on judgment day, a rotting corpse, a few atoms scattered over the countryside, or in some animal's spoor?  That can't be right.  Do you come back as you were just before you died - blown apart, say, or wracked with disease - perhaps in flames?  Surely not.  Maybe you'll be as you were just before whatever killed you happened.  So all the people who died of old age get to be in their nineties forever?  What an inducement to off yourself when you're young and healthy.  What about all the dead children, infants, and the stillborn? They go to heaven too, do they not?  Do they get to spend eternity as half-formed beings, incapable of communication, frozen forever in that helpless and dependent state, never to grow up, never to love?  And what about the people who have always been deformed or ugly? They never had a satisfactory body they'd want to spend eternity in.  


How else could it work?  Maybe the all-merciful god allows you to choose what version of your body you will be in forever.  That would be fair and democratic, though religion is the least fair and democratic of all human pursuits.  What would you choose - that innocent child you were when you were ten, before puberty turned you into a carnal beast?  In early middle age, when you're at the apex of your maturity and mental powers?  How about in your twenties, when you're at the height of your physical attractiveness?  Do you get to choose any appearance you want?  Will there be billions of people who all look just like Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz?  That would be confusing - "Martha, is that you?" But it could also be pretty hot with all those beautiful bodies everywhere.  Oh wait - there's no sex in heaven is there?  I think most Judeo-Christians would agree on that.  No sweaty angels banging each other.  So we can all be young and beautiful, but we can't be attracted to one another or have sex.  All those genitalia, just like God's own (He made us in his image, remember) waving around in the celestial breeze but never to be used or even touched.  Sorry, I just don't see how resurrection in the flesh can possibly work.


Maybe this is another case where the Bible can't be taken literally.  Like most things in the Bible (such as the Ten Commandments), most believers today say that we are free to interpret the Bible; it's a guide, not a rigid law.  As a non-believer, I can't understand this.  It's either the absolute word of God or it isn't.  If it is God's law, how the hell do you have the nerve to say you can interpret it as you wish, even disregard vast portions of its strictures and commandments - who made you God's editor?  The Bible says we should kill our children if they disobey us, we should kill or enslave anyone of different religions, and hundreds of other examples of horrific behavior even devout Christians no longer obey.  (And if it isn't God's word, then all scripture is a bunch of wishful superstitious fantasy, so that obviously can't be it.)  It strikes me odd that each generation of true believers interprets the word of God as they see fit, eliminating commandments they see as outdated or inconvenient.  Leaving that aside, let's say this new liberal reading is acceptable.  It's okay to make graven images (Catholics especially are big on statues); it's okay to kill if the other guy is black or gay or an atheist, etc.  If you think you can toss out some selected commandments, that's fine with me. I certainly don't want Christian sharia law.  If every person who committed adultery were stoned to death, there would be damned few folks to read my screeds - or write them.

Okay, so in spite of what the Bible says, we don't resurrect in the flesh.  We're some kind of bodiless spirits that float around in the ether.  That certainly eliminates a whole lot of awkward questions about eating, grocery stores, and celestial Port-a-cans. Personally, I find it hard to imagine my mind (okay, soul if you insist - same thing) existing without a body.  To me, my body is not a container for me - it is me.  Who I am is so inextricably interwoven with my body, its experiences and travels and sensations and injuries and tastes and desires, that I can't think of what I would be like without it.  I suppose I can imagine my mind being somehow extracted from my body, like uploading it onto a cloud server somewhere - a common science fiction trope.  I can even imagine it being downloaded into another body, or a cybernetic body, or even a mechanical body, and my existence continuing.  But to be incorporeal forever, with no physical location, no center, no sense organs, no residence, seems inconceivable - and very unappealing.

But I'm not a believer.  If I were, apparently this would be the desired state I worked and prayed all my life to attain: having no physical form, unchanging forever, unable to do any of the physical things that make life worthwhile - eating, traveling, going for a swim or a hike, petting a dog, making love.  We will be in the presence of God, and that will be enough.  I am content.

One thing we know for sure - we'll be surrounded by our loved ones - everybody we cared about in our lives will be there.  That's the whole point of heaven.  Our deceased parents will be together forever, whether they got along or not, and no matter how shabbily they may have treated each other in life.  For better or for worse, whatever parents we got in life, they'll be with us every day forever.  Our deceased spouses will be right there, too - all of them.  I hope they learn to share and don't mind being your third husband.  There are some people I really don't like in this life - I hope they don't end up being my neighbors in Heaven.  My idea of heaven might be to spend eternity with my wife, but hers might be to spend it with her first husband, or that cute quarterback from high school. One of us has to be in hell, I guess.

All our ancestors will be there too - every great-great-grandfather and -mother, going all the way back to - what?  Our Neanderthal ancestors, Homo erectus?  How about the first protozoa?  Sure will be crowded.  Oh, that's right, all that history and fossil stuff, physics and chemistry and astronomy and that other claptrap - that's just God's little practical joke, piling up overwhelming evidence in every place we look that there is an ancient history, when actually time started six thousand years ago, just a few hundred years after the first ziggurats were built in Mesopotamia.  He must have a very good reason to have every shred of evidence point unerringly to the exact same incorrect age of the universe.  But that's another rant.

No matter how long ago time started, there are billions of our ancestors up there with us.  I certainly hope we all get along, even though their lives and beliefs were so radically different from those of us newcomers.  Will they sneer at how easy we had it when we were alive?  What will we have in common with our Egyptian or Celtic or African ancestors?  We won't even speak the same language.  We better not talk politics or religion, and current events would be a bit strange as well.  I'd imagine we'd spend the first few millennia just getting the old ones caught up with the news.  "Did you say the Goths sacked Rome, young feller?"

But let's put aside all these difficulties and questions - just ignore them like believers do - what would it be like to be in heaven?  We won't have any of the things we like to do now - no football on TV, no rock'n'roll, no movies or books, no long walks on the beach, no great dinners with friends, no meeting new people.  So what will we do?  We'll all be as the angels - perfect beings.  We will be perfectly static.  Since we're perfect, there will be no need to strive, to travel, to grow, to learn, to improve ourselves.  There will be no crime, no accidents, no stress, no disease, no worries - indeed, no news, no events, no change, forever.  Not just for hundreds of years or billions of years, but forever and ever, amen.  Sounds boring and pointless to me, but I'm only an unbeliever.  I guess that sounds good to believers.  There are those cool harps, though.  Everybody likes listening to harp music.

When you look at it in any detail, any attempt to really grasp it, the whole concept of heaven doesn't work, no matter how ethereal and non-corporeal you try to make it.  It can't be imagined.  It only works as a concept if it's completely vague.  Don't ask all those questions, just believe.  It will be wonderful; everyone will be perfectly happy all the time.  But that's not the kind of beings we are.  I can't imagine a human being who is happy all the time; I can't imagine a large number of people in all the vast variety of humanity all getting along without any conflict.

To me, it's exactly like all the rest of religion.  There is not one atom of evidence for any of it.  And no, waving around an old book that says it's true is not evidence.  There are thousands of mutually contradictory holy scriptures, with different creation myths, rules and regulations, and descriptions of paradise.  Because they all say different things, they can't all be right.  But they could all be wrong.

Why then do so many people believe in it so strongly?  There is only one perfectly obvious answer: because they wish it were so.  They see people doing evil and going unpunished, so they want to believe that they will be punished with eternal torment.  They see good people suffering and being oppressed, and they want to believe that there is a perfect place where they can live in bliss.  They see their loved ones dying, and they want to believe they will be reunited.  They see wars and plagues and famines and natural disasters, a vast complicated uncaring universe with no purpose and no justice, and they want to believe in a loving father who loves us and watches over us and has a plan to protect us.  And above everything else, they see death riding headlong toward them and they cannot bear the thought that they will soon cease to exist.  So they imagine a perfect world in the sky where they will live forever.  It is a perfectly reasonable fear and an understandable desire.  Who would not want it to be so?  Alas, wishing does not make it true.  As Mark Twain famously remarked, "Faith is believing what you know ain't true."

Why Are We Here?

Why Are We Here?

There are certain fundamental questions of philosophy.  What is existence?  What was its beginning, and what will be its end?  Does it have a purpose?  What is right and wrong?  And if we can’t answer those questions, how do we know right from wrong - how should we live?  All these questions depend on answering the one most basic question of all: Why are we here?  Unless we know this primary answer, we can’t hope to approach any of the other derivative questions with certainty.  If we don’t know our goal we can’t possibly know what’s important, which actions advance our purpose and which retard it.

This is very probably one of the first questions humans asked when we first developed language (perhaps right after “Can I have some of that? and “Come here often?”)  It’s easy to imagine some early hominid looking up at the stars one night, feeling that same chill of wonder we’ve all felt, and for the first time wondering where she fit into it.  How big is the world?  What are the stars?  How did it all begin?  Why are we here?  Those first philosophers had no way to even begin to search for answers.  But the desire for answers, the need for an explanation, was so overwhelming, they invented the world’s first mythologies.  As other cultures sensed the same mysteries, they developed other myths to answer their questions.  What else could they do?  And religions are still being born every day

As gratifying and comforting (or terrifying) as those myths were, they had no empirical support – no reason to believe them except the need to believe in something.  They became the foundation of culture.  You learned the myths of the culture into which you were born and that was the end of it.  Some cultures did not permit questioning the myths, others were more open to doubt, but it made no real difference – one culture’s guesses were as unverifiable as every other’s.  They had no tools to help them determine the truth.

Remarkably enough, we now have those tools.

Over the millennia since that first question, the situation has not really changed, but our interpretation of the terms has altered drastically.  The first people to ask it probably thought of “we” as “you and I” or “our family.”  Most tribal cultures think of their tribe as human beings and all others as something non-human.  As populations increased and human communities grew in size, “we” expanded to refer to a village, a city-state, a nation, a race.  For some enlightened few, “we” truly means all of humanity.  Today we’re seeing the beginnings of a step beyond even that.  Many of us in the 21^st century commonly see ourselves as only incrementally different from other living things.  Earth’s biosphere evolved as a whole over billions of years, and humans are an integral and inseparable part of it.  We’d die without the biosphere we were born in – but it would not die without us.  We are only one of many races that inhabit the planet, all voices in the eternal chorus of life.  We can accept organisms as diverse as viruses, octopuses, tube-worms, and anaerobic bacteria as our relatives.  Rather than “Why are we here?” it seems most logical now to ask, “Why is life here?”

In an analogous process, the word “here” of the original question has expanded immeasurably.  It might have started as “this valley” or “our tribe’s land.”  As we grew to identify with larger communities, so our home territory expanded.  Recently most people would have defined “here” as the planet Earth.  But there are now people living off the planet, and by the end of the decade our probes will have visited every planet in our system.  It no longer seems like science fiction to talk of colonies on the moon or other planets.  Even if the rest of the galaxy turns out to be lifeless, the question of its origin and meaning has lost none of its relevance.  And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond.  If there is sentient life anywhere out there, no matter how different, no matter how separate in origin, are we not related, if only by experiencing the same universe together?  It may be an immense geographic leap to push the boundaries of “here” to the edges of the universe, but it is a small step for philosophy.

So if we (some of us) have now advanced to the point where we can abandon our provincial anthropocentric and geocentric view, then “we” does not exclude any “they” and “here” allows for no “there.”  The question has become even more elemental: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Of course, we can continue to provide answers as the first philosophers did – by inventing gods and supernatural forces that created everything and established the rules by which it moves.  But this is pure guesswork.  No matter how morally or spiritually satisfying such constructs may be, it is impossible to either prove or disprove them.  Intellectually we are left with no more certainty or understanding than that puzzled hominid ancestor.  We live in an age of reason, in which science is continually expanding our frontiers and routinely providing us with tools and knowledge that former ages would have judged as miraculous, magical, divine – or diabolical.

The methods of science have proven undeniably effective at developing technologies and providing solutions.  We can predict the motions of the planets, travel to other planets, build computers and machines and vehicles that far exceed the abilities and powers of those who build and use them.  Science has been so successful that many of those seeking answers to the deep questions now turn not to our theologians and philosophers but to our scientists.

But is this a reasonable expectation?  Learned as they are, scientists are only human, and their methods require them to measure and test.  How can we expect them to discern the structure and history of something as unimaginably ancient and extensive as the entire universe, let alone address the question of its meaning?

Rather surprisingly, given the physical limitations of our bodies and minds – tools developed to find food and avoid being food – and our geographical isolation in a remote backwater spiral arm of a middling galaxy, we have actually developed techniques that can answer the primal question with reasonable certainty.  It is now possible to say how we got here, and by extension, why.

One of the most mysterious and ineffable mysteries is the experience of our own consciousness.  Previously attributed to a soul or some divine spark that set us forever apart from the “lower” physical and animal world, recent developments in neuroscience and the ability to map brain activity have found no evidence for any non-physical component of our existence.  Our consciousness is simply the subjective experience of having a brain that absorbs and analyzes the various sensory input, governed and influenced by the subtle mix of chemicals that constantly ebb and flow through our brains.  We have found infinitesimal gates that open and close on our neurons, allowing only molecules with specific shapes to pass.  Microscopic organic factories release neurotransmitters and hormones to control sleep and waking, emotions and urges – even religious feelings – all precisely balanced to better adapt our bodies to the needs of survival, finding food, and mating.  We are far from understanding how it works, but we can see the machinery.  There is no need to imagine an ineffable spirit that inhabits our minds, a homunculus sitting in a control room.  There is no control room in the brain, no sensory organs, no ego or will directing its functioning.  Given a brain, consciousness is what happens.

Where then did the brain come from – how did such a complex structure arise?  That too is easily accounted for.  We can see the progression of brain development in other animals, from the simplest neural node in a sponge or flatworm, through progressively more advanced structures, until we reach the current state of the art, the modern human brain.  Our ability to communicate and innovate has given us technology that has allowed us to cover the planet and even alter its systems.  And yet there is no clear evidence that the human brain is qualitatively different from those of other mammals, just proportionally larger.  The development of the brain parallels the development of all the other organs and structures that make up living organisms.  They get more complex and efficient at helping their host bodies to survive, because their hosts must reproduce.  If they fail, that genetic line ceases to exist.  Only successful organisms can exist.  No will, no purpose, no guiding hand is necessary.

We understand the principles of genetics, of sexual reproduction and heredity, of mutation, competition, and evolution.  Natural selection answers every question that can be asked concerning the origins of biological structures, functions, and complexity.  Given a living organism that can reproduce, evolution inevitably leads to change and increased complexity as organisms compete and adapt to changing environments.  Once the process is started, it will continue (barring a catastrophic destruction of the Earth itself).  We have found evidence of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, not long after the planet had cooled after its formation.  Continents have split apart and smashed together, mountains have been pushed up and eroded away, asteroids have pummeled the planet, millions of species have arisen, evolved, and gone extinct - and still that original chain of life continues.  It is not inaccurate to say that the first organism capable of reproducing is still alive.  It is us, in the larger, modern sense - everything that lives.

So we can explain all that came after that first organism came to be.  But doesn’t that first step require some sort of miracle?  How can life have arisen spontaneously from non-life?  Surprisingly, scientists can now answer even this.

Chemists and physicists have explored the physical nature of matter and the forces that control it to unprecedented depths, on scales from the cosmic to the sub-nuclear.  There is good understanding of how subatomic particles interact to make the infinite varieties of objects we see around us, including ourselves.  But what are these particles – what are they made of and where did they come from?

The problem is analogous to one in geometry.  Given a set of unprovable assumptions (a point has position but no dimensions; a line always ends in two points, etc.), complex proofs can be constructed to build unshakable logical constructs that have both beauty and utility.  But why are these axioms as they are?  In mathematics no answers have been found.  But in physics the axioms have been reduced to what is known as the “six numbers” - the mass of an electron, the relative strengths of the basic forces, and so forth.  With the values they have, all the complex interactions can be explained.  But if any of these numbers were even slightly different, the universe as we know it could not exist – it could not form atoms, or stars, or living organisms, for instance.  But why are all the numbers “just right?”  The best available answer seems to be a combination of the “many worlds” hypothesis and the anthropic principle - there are many universes and ours is constructed with just the right values because if it weren’t we wouldn’t be here.  While some may find this explanation unsatisfactory, it meets all the requirements of a scientific theory and the answers were derived from some solutions to the equations of general relativity, which have been proven right in every test ever conceived in over a century of trying, and which make predictions that have proved true in every case.

No satisfactory explanation has ever been provided for the axioms of geometry.  We simply hold them to be self-evident.  But in the realm of physics it is a different story. General relativity laid the groundwork.  It has been refined, but in spite of the best efforts of rigorous skeptics, the equations of relativity have withstood every challenge for over a century.  After some periods of stagnation, work is currently advancing rapidly in this field.  Some researchers are working toward a Grand Unified Theory – a set of equations whose solutions will determine all six of these numbers – and therefore provide proof that our understanding is verifiably correct.  The recent confirmed discovery of the Higgs boson went a long way toward validating this approach to understanding the nature of existence.

And what is the truth these theories reveal?  That a universe can spring out of literally nothing, create all of space and all of time, sprout eleven dimensions, expand by 10⁷⁸ times in the first 10^-32 seconds, and evolve life, with no causal event.  Given the laws we have discovered, once this event occurs, we will have a vast amount of energy that will condense into very large quantities of hydrogen, about a quarter of it fused into helium, and all under the influence of gravity, which tries to draw it into interaction.

John Dobson – astrophysicist, defrocked monk, and inventor of the eponymous telescope mount that revolutionized amateur astronomy – said it most succinctly: “What do you get if you have lots of hydrogen under the influence of gravity for a long time?  Us.”  Every step on the path is understood in its general principles: atoms into molecules, molecules into more complex molecules, molecules capable of reproducing themselves, living organisms, intelligence.  Great variation is possible – the current result could not have been foretold – but not infinite variation.  The six numbers limit the process – stars can only become so big, planets will form around them in certain ways, atmospheres and energy cycles will arise within certain parameters.  Given those six numbers, life is inevitable.

So the great questions are answered.  We know what existence is, how it started and how it became the way we find it now.  We could now tell that awe-struck hominid why we are here.  And God is not required.  Just as we gave up believing in Thor and Vulcan when we understood thunder and lightning, we no longer need a god to explain our existence.  While no scientific experiment could prove God does not exist, we can explain every mystery without recourse to the supernatural.  God can be eliminated, his throat slit by Occam’s Razor.

Is this universe we finally understand satisfying?  We have learned we are small and insignificant, a mote in the eye of a universe so immense in space and time that we and all our works shrink to an infinitesimal spark in a vast fire.  Is it cold and meaningless with no God lovingly tending it?  Many will say so.  People feel the needle of their moral compass must strain toward some pole, some underlying moral code now inextricably bound up with religious belief.  If there is no God, there are no morals.  It is only the fear of damnation to your particular cultural nightmare that keeps us from moral anarchy.

But there is no reason for morals and ethics, the sense of correct behavior, to be in any way connected with ancient creation myths.  In fact it is precisely because of those myths that we are so violent and fractious.  When Sunnis kill Shias, when Christians kill Muslims, when Protestants bomb Catholics, we outsiders can’t tell them apart.  People see these religions as comfortable, stabilizing belief systems that contribute to good behavior.  But in fact they are the exact opposite.  There is no evidence that religious people are less violent or cruel or selfish, especially to anyone other than their co-religionists.  The beliefs contribute to divisiveness, violence, intolerance, and resistance to the acceptance of proven facts like evolution and anthropogenic climate change.  They are as real and verifiable as gravity or electricity.  The science is not controversial.  No one would question these discoveries for a second if they did not conflict with somebody’s scripture.  There is a T-shirt that says, “Science flies us to the moon.  Religion flies us into buildings.”

We’ve relegated Thor and Zeus and Jove into the realm of fiction, charming folktales from a simpler, more ignorant time.  Isn’t it time for Jehovah and Allah and all the rest to join them?