We Finally Know Why Men Exist!

According to recent discoveries outlined in the Telegraph males like myself are here to "help purge negative and maintain positive genetic variation in a population."  So there you have it.

For a long time, biologists have been confused at the continued existence of males.  Given that males do not themselves reproduce it is a wasteful drain on the species to produce them in 50% of the population. It would be much more sensible "in evolutionary terms to have an all-female asexual population which creates daughters who can reproduce rather than sons who cannot, such as the Mexican Whiptail Lizard."

So in as much as males do exist and evolution has not selected us out the assumption is that there must be a good reason for it.  Why this same reasoning doesn't apply to that Mexican Lizard is not mentioned.  The entire edifice of Darwinian theory rests on the assumption that there are limited resources that all species are in a perpetual death struggle to procure.  The ones with the benefit of a useful, random mutation (though mutations are almost always non-beneficial) will be incrementally better at accessing those resources - thus thriving and passing on that beneficial trait to their progeny.

There are questions to be asked regarding these assumptions:

1. Why do species "care" about survival in the first place?  Why couldn't "nature" have randomly started with a death wish or with no motivation of any sort?
2. Why has evolution selected celibacy, voluntary army service, abortion and other practices that limit the population (the supposed motivating drive of all species)? 
3. Where did the information come from for the radically different designs of males and females - can the steps be explained?
4. What process generated the information that allows males and females to "work" together to reproduce?
5. Is it presumable that the reproductive system would have to work perfectly from the beginning?  What accounts for this perfection?  If it developed over time, how did reproduction occur at earlier stages?

There is another way of looking at all of this - that males and females were created by a conscious designer - one who was aware of all of the benefits (including biological, sociological, spiritual) of having more than one gender.  This conscious agent would also be capable of executing on the design from the get go so that no risky "random" mutating would be responsible for generating the staggering amount of specified functional information that is required for even the simplest organism to live and reproduce.

"What is man that you should remember him and the son of mortal man that you should be mindful of him?  Yet you have made him but slightly less than the angels and crowned him with soul and splendor."  

Tehillim (Psalm) 8:5-6

The Origin of Life Problem - Still Not Solved

A reader was kind enough to send me this article from ScienceMag.org entitled "Researchers May Have Solved The Origin-Of-Life Conundrum."  While this is certainly an interesting approach, the title is a tad misleading.  What it boils down to is something akin to oncologists declaring that the most recent theoretical anti-cancer treatment "may have cured cancer" (except that that one could actually be tested).  In their own words "could life have kindled in that common pool?  That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history."  And "this general scenario raises many questions and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come."

So, yes, while they may indeed have solved the conundrum, our knowledge of it (and theirs) will remain hidden for some time.  As of now, the issue remains perplexing as ever and should once again serve to highlight the formidable obstacle that abiogenesis (how animate life arose from the inanimate) still poses for origin of life researchers.  With that in mind I'd like to re-post something that I wrote for the Huffington Post a few years back called "A Reasonable Argument For God's Existence" - I don't think that much has changed since then.

Friends,

In our recent dialogue I have noticed a consistent theme. It was frequently remarked that religious lines of argumentation lack reason. The contention seems to be that most, if not all, religious systems rely solely on wholly unsubstantiated faith to support their beliefs.

Is this contention in fact true? From a theistic perspective the reality seems quite inverted in that it would appear to require an unreasonable commitment to naturalism to maintain a denial of the transcendent.

Rabbi Moshe Averick has done yeoman's work in deconstructing the arguments in favor of naturalistic explanations to the origin of life and has concurrently demonstrated the high degree of intellectual vigor of theistic reasoning. This post is a paraphrase of his analysis of the origin of life problem that confronts the naturalist camp within the scientific community. A full treatment is available in his indispensable book Nonsense of a High Order.

One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it. The truth of the matter is that we see scientists coming up surprisingly empty-handed and that even within scientific circles, the few hypotheses they do have are shredded to ribbons by their colleagues within the scientific community.

So how is a non-religious scientist expected to contend with this dearth of hard evidence? Some seem to have recognized the dead ends within the maze and the subsequent outgrowth of a scientific version of a "faith" in light of the problem:

"One must conclude that ... a scenario describing the genesis of life on Earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written." (Dr. H.P. Yockey, physicist, information theorist and contributor to the Manhattan Project)

"The theory behind theory is that you come up with truly testable ideas. Otherwise it's no different from faith. It might as well be a religion if there's no evidence for it." (Dr. J. Craig Venter, Biologist and one of the first people to sequence the human genome)

And there's the rub: There just is no evidence for it. Not one of them has the foggiest notion about how to answer life's most fundamental question: How did life arise on our planet? The non-believer is thus faced with two choices: to accept as an article of faith that science will eventually arrive at a reasonable, naturalistic conclusion to this intellectual black box or to choose to believe in the vanishingly small odds that the astonishing complexity, intelligence and mystery of life came about as a result of chance, which of course presents its own problems:

"Suppose you took scrabble sets, or any word game sets, blocks with letters containing every language on Earth and you heap them together, and then you took a scoop and you scooped into that heap, and you flung it out on the lawn there and the letters fell into a line which contained the words, 'to be or not to be that is the question,' that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule appearing on the Earth." (Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University)

Ask yourself, do you believe in the RNA molecule? Do you accept Dr. Shapiro's scrabble analogy as an actual possibility? Most people intuitively recognize that it's not a reasonable position to hold. Everybody knows that too many good hands at the blackjack table will get you kicked out of Vegas and that arguing to casino security that your three hours of consecutive 21s are theoretically possible will not be accepted as a valid defense. Nonetheless, these odds are what many are suggesting we accept. The resulting cognitive dissonance seems to have a negative effect on some of those making the argument:

"It is this combative atmosphere which sometimes encourages scientists writing and speaking about the origin of life to become as dogmatic and bigoted as the creationist opponents they so despise." (Dr. Andrew Scott, Chemist and science writer)

This inescapable conundrum is what has driven otherwise brilliant minds to concoct such exotic (and evidence-averse) theories as directed panspermia -- the notion that life was seeded on Earth by space aliens -- posited by Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick and at times seconded by Richard Dawkins. The (unfalsifiable) multiverse theory is another example. At times these researchers, despite themselves, seem to grasp the sheer unlikelihood of the whole enterprise and start groping for the most unscientific of words to explain themselves:

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle." (Francis Crick)

Amazingly, even Richard Dawkins has written that, "I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859." Why? Because in 1859 Darwin published his Origin of Species. But so what? This entire discussion is taking place outside of an evolutionary context. Evolution can only begin once we already have a dazzlingly complex, self-replicating, living cell with which to work. That -- the origin of that first cell, not what happened thereafter -- is the fundamental basis of disagreement between theist and atheist. I make that statement with a full awareness of the fact that scientists hypothesize the prior existence of "simple" self replicating molecules that led up to the emergence of the DNA based bacterium; but this just pushes the question back a step. There is no conclusive evidence that such molecules ever did, or could, spontaneously self-assemble on the prebiotic earth. Again, even Dawkins candidly admits regarding this notion that, "I don't know how [it started], nor does anyone else."

I posit to you that all the evidence points, in an obvious and inextricable way, to a supernatural explanation for the origin of life. If there are no known naturalistic explanations and the likelihood that "chance" played any role is wildly minute, then it is a perfectly reasonable position to take that a conscious super-intelligence (that some of us call God) was the architect of life on this planet. Everyone agrees to the appearance of design. It is illogical to assume its non-design in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between Science and the Supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism ... for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door." (Richard Lewontin, Geneticist)

Fine Tuning: The Materialist Minefield

Not long ago, science thought that it had a comprehensive understanding of the workings of the universe pretty much wrapped up.  As Lord Kelvin confidently remarked back at the end of the 19th century: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement."  You gotta appreciate the confidence (haughtiness?) there but oh, how far from accurate he was.

It seems clear to me that among the manifold issues that the materialist worldview proposes, the fine-tuning problem is the biggest.  What is the fine-tuning argument?  According to the Biologos website it "refers to the surprising precision of nature's constants, and the beginning state of the universe.  To explain the present state of the universe, even the best scientific theories require that the physical constants of nature and the beginning state of the universe have extremely precise values." See their article on the subject here.

Recently, author and lecturer, Eric Metaxas has been making quite a splash discussing this topic publicly.  His piece for the WSJ was their most shared article ever.   Here he is making the case on Prager University.

This is basically where things are at.  Either this argument is true and there is a God or (as the other side sometimes claims) there are an infinite number of universes and this seemingly perfect one is just the lucky winner in an endless sea of possibility.  Ironically, the people who tend to claim that science has (or will have) all the answers are positing an un-testable, un-observable and thus un-scientific theory. Outside of that it has philosophical issues, such as if there are truly an infinite number of universes, then all logical possibilities must occur - including a universe in which God exists and created the entire multiverse (whose existence they claim refutes God).

Watch the video and consider for yourself..


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God, Volcanos and Circumstantial Evidence

This originally ran in HuffPo and is a compendium for this week's Torah portion - Yitro.  Enjoy!

The jurors in Sidney Lumet's classic 1957 film 12 Angry Men were presented with what they thought was an open and shut case. A young Hispanic man with a weak alibi was seen fleeing the murder location and the murder weapon (a knife he claimed to have lost) was found at the scene of the crime. Eleven of the twelve jurors immediately voted guilty in the capital case while Juror Number 8 alone (Henry Fonda) dissented. The remainder of the film portrays the gradual unraveling of the case and ultimate vindication of the defendant. Things are not always what they seem.

This metaphor leaped to mind as I made my way through another classic -- Yehezkel Kaufmann's The Religion of Israel. Kaufmann was Ukrainian born, Yeshiva educated and became a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1949. Unlike many of his colleagues and peers, professor Kaufmann believed that there was very little or no pagan influence or roots in the religion of the Jews. In summation of his view he wrote that "Israelite religion was an original creation of the people of Israel. It was absolutely different from anything the pagan world knew; its monotheistic world view has no antecedents in paganism."

What then to make of the many seemingly obvious references to pagan ideas in the text of the Torah? God says "let us make man in our image." Who is He talking to given that He's supposedly the sole Creator? What does it mean that Adam and Eve "heard the sound of God walking in the Garden?" How about references to "the hand of God," "the breath of God" or the description of God as a "man of war?"

Then there is the revelation at Sinai with its dramatic depiction of fire, smoke and the shuddering of the mountain. Doesn't this seem just all too similar to pagan descriptions of a volcanic god? Isn't it clear that this story was adapted from some earlier pagan myth that the Jews preserved and incorporated into their holy book? Isn't this strong evidence that the God of the Jews is really just an upgraded version of one of the many gods who were thought to rule over natural forces?

Actually no, not at all.

Professor Kaufmann was an expert in the (substantial) differences between the pagan and Israelite world-views. In category after category he shows their dissimilarity -- from divination to the notion of morality to demonology and the use of magic -- the religion of Israel had a very different way of approaching these matters. As he wrote:

The mark of monotheism is not the concept of a god who is a creator, eternal, benign or even all-powerful; these notions are found everywhere in the pagan world. It is, rather, the idea of a god who is the source of all being, not subject to a cosmic order and not emergent from a pre-existent realm; a god free of the limitations of magic and mythology.

So back to our volcano. What we see in the account of the Book of Exodus is the reference to fire, smoke, earthquake and thunder, but as Kaufmann writes:

This is hardly sufficient to make YHVH a volcanic deity. Volcanic gods are conceived of as dwelling within the mountain; their element is the subterranean fire that sets the mountain quaking. Thunder and lightning are 'over the mountain'; it smokes 'because YHVH descended upon it in fire.' When YHVH speaks it is 'from heaven.' There is little merit to the view that the presence of storm features in YHVH's theophanies points to his being originally a storm god.

Perhaps this original, uniquely monotheistic, understanding of Divinity is best expressed through Elijah's experience in the Book of Kings whereby the prophet experiences God as "a great, powerful wind, smashing mountains and breaking rocks." This would sound an awful lot like the storm god again were it not for the fact that the next lines are "God is not in the wind! After the wind came an earthquake. God is not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire. God is not in the fire. After the fire came still, thin sound." That sound was God.

Oftentimes, the smoke and lights obscure the truth rather than reveal it. Sometimes evidence seems so obvious and so compelling that we think it just must be so. How could it be that all of these variables line up so perfectly -- storm, fire and earthquake or knife, witnesses and poor alibi? Case closed. But like Juror Number 8, it's critically important to slow down, ask questions, imagine alternative scenarios and follow the truth wherever it leads. And the truth can only be perceived in the "thin small voice," the one that only comes on the heels of the fireworks.

We are all guilty of this to some degree. We leap to conclusions about what others have said or done without having all of the facts. We imagine we understanding the complexities of science, geopolitics or economics by reading a few popular articles or books and we judge theology largely based on some similarly dermal information we've picked up or been taught. Getting to a topic's true inner meaning (if possible at all) takes time, patience, breadth and depth of knowledge and an abiding willingness to question the "obvious."

God is not in the wind -- or in the volcano.

Rethinking the Exodus

I saw this film and met the film-maker a few months ago.  I was very impressed by it and wholeheartedly recommend seeing it.  Here are my thoughts on it which I recently posted on HuffPo:

In his classic "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," physicist, historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn introduced the world to the term "paradigm shift." He posited that rather than developing in a linear, step by step fashion, science tends to undergo periodic revolutions that wholly reshape how we understand the earlier research.

He divided the revolution pattern into five distinct phases:

1. The pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory.

2. Normal Science, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm.

3. The Crisis Phase, when after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail.

4. Scientific revolution, the phase in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established.

5. Post-Revolution, the new paradigm's dominance is established and so scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.

Kuhn cited Atomism in Chemistry and the Copernican Revolution as classic examples of his theory. Today we can easily add cosmology, biology, neurology, food science and others to the list.

For scientists like Kuhn (and chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi) the scientific endeavor is inherently fraught with subjectivity and as such is a relativized discipline. People, no matter how intelligent, are biased and scientists, being people themselves, are no less subject to this phenomenon than anyone else. At its heart then, the inherent resistance to the cognitive dissonance caused by competing scientific models is much more of an emotional matter than a scientific one - it involves a willingness to accept and make peace with a reality that is unlike what was believed or hoped for. In this regard, Dr. Kuhn's five stages are akin to Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Mourning - a gradual process of letting go.

It's in that light that we should view the scientific evidence of the Biblical Exodus. The world of Archaeology has long held that the arc of Near Eastern history has been meticulously mapped and that no concrete evidence has ever emerged to suggest that there had been an actual mass migration out of Egypt. Until now - perhaps.

Filmmaker Tim Mahoney has spent the last twelve years exploring the state of our collective understanding of the evidence (or lack thereof) of the Biblical Exodus. He has traveled the globe and spoken to the world's leading experts on the topic. As a religious Christian it was a personal matter for him and one who's twists and turns caused him no small amount of doubt, fear and confusion. "Patterns of Evidence" is a feature length documentary that he has written and directed - and it details the conclusion that he drew at the end of his journey.

Like other scientific revolutions, the earlier paradigm is based on a certain set of assumptions - which if accurate will tell the true historical story. But if they are not, they can easily prevent the true story from ever coming to light.

As Mahoney recently explained:

"Mainstream archaeologists would say that if the Exodus ever happened, it happened at the time of Rameses, because of the biblical text that said the Israelites were building the city of Rameses. Yet when people understood Rameses lived around 1250 B.C., they didn't find evidence for this type of story in that time period."

"But other archaeologists said to look deeper," he continued. "Beneath the city of Rameses, was another city, much older, called Avaris. And that city was filled with Semitic people. It started very small, just as the Bible says, and over time it grew into one of the largest cities of that time. And that is where we find, I think, the early Israelites. That's the pattern that matches the story of the Bible. It's not at the time of Rameses, but it's at the location of Rameses."

Clearly that would be a significant detail.

Another fascinating line of thinking that he follows concerns the discovery of a royal tomb of an unknown figure who was of Semitic stock and of an area of housing that bears a striking resemblance to those in the area that the Hebrews were said to originate. Could this be evidence of Egypt's Goshen neighborhood that the Book of Genesis says the Hebrews settled in? Is it possible that the unusual tomb is that of the Biblical Joseph?

Mahoney again explains:

"The story of Joseph tells of how he was sold as a slave and came into Egypt and then he rose to become this leader, second in command in Egypt. Well, in Avaris, the archaeology shows a small group of Semitic-type people came in, and then there's this house that matches the area where they would have come from. On top of that house a palace was built. They had tombs behind this palace. And this palace had a statue, and it was the tomb of a Semitic leader."

"The interesting thing is this statue found in the remainder of this tomb, a pyramid tomb - which was only given to royalty types - why did a Semitic character have this? What some people are saying is that this matches the story, maybe that prestige that Joseph would have received."

He also points out that the tomb contains no bones - a detail that accords with the Biblical account but would be unlikely otherwise as thieves generally have no interest in the bones but only in whatever spoils the tomb might contain.

Patterns of Evidence is an engaging, visually pleasing and fascinating piece of film-making whatever one believes. It's meticulously presented and researched and gives a remarkable amount of air time to the detractors and as such cannot be accused of polemics or propagandizing.

Scientific revolutions take time. I sense that this may be the opening salvo in a brand new one.

Seven Things Atheists Get Wrong

I had been meaning to post this for a while - an interesting perspective from a friend of a friend (David Marcus) at the Federalist:

In a spectacular and telling failure of journalism MSNBC reported recently that Pope Francis “broke with Catholic tradition” by asserting that the Big Bang theory is real. Instantly, the Internet responded with the name Georges Lemaitre, one of the creators of the Theory of Universal Expansion who also happened to be a Jesuit priest. He is also the first entry on a Google search of “Catholic Big Bang.”

That the MSNBC author did not bother to do one search before making a pronouncement about the faith of a billion people displays abysmal incompetence. But it also reflects very skewed and dangerous ideas about the nature of religion widely held in the media and creative class. As atheist Sam Harris put it in his article “Science Must Destroy Religion”: “the conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero sum.” This confrontational attitude ,which is unnecessary and harmful, springs from a slew of misconceptions about religion as a human phenomenon.

1. Religion Is About Morality, Not Creation Myths

It was apt that MSNBCs misnomer about the Catholic view of science concerned creation. Often the origin of the earth and of man plays a central role in the science versus religion debate. There are jokes about cave men riding dinosaurs, deep concerns about our children being exposed to the idea of intelligent design, and disdain thrown upon those who question the almighty power of science. But, frankly, creation, while fascinating, is not the most important aspect of the atheist critique of religion. Morality is. The means by which the earth was made plays an insignificant role in our daily lives. Moral choices, on the other hand, are made every day, and they have long, lingering effects.

2. Religion Is the Foundation of All Morality, Not Merely an Expression of It

The atheist approach to the non-empirical question of “how do we determine right from wrong” tends to be a negative ad campaign listing the horrors done in the name of religion. Whether it is the Inquisition or ISIS, atheists argue that these barbarities stem directly from the intolerance of religious texts and practices. On the surface it can be a persuasive argument, but upon deeper reflection it becomes murky.

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, inadvertently exposed the complexity of religion’s relationship to morality and barbarism in a debate. Confronted with the fact that Stalin was an atheist who committed genocide, he said:

In Russia in 1917 for hundreds of years billions of people had been told that the head of the state is a supernatural power...This has been inculcated in generations of Russians for hundreds of years, if you are Josef Stalin, himself a seminarian from Georgia, you shouldn’t be in the totalitarianism business if you can’t exploit a ready made reservoir of credulity and servility.

Hitchens is too clever for his own good here. In broadening the scope of immoral actions caused by religion to capture the acts of atheists, he broadens it so completely that it captures everything. Hitchens, in his eagerness to blame religion for Stalin’s atrocities asserts that religion is the foundation for all moral choices, not merely those made in religion’s name.

He is absolutely right. All of us, whether atheist, agnostic, or a member of a religion, practice morality based on religion. Without religion there would never have been morality. There was no peaceful, Adamite paradise of moral choice which religion sullied millennia ago. Before religion, there was murder and rape and all manner of horrors just as there are today. It was religion that first sought to constrain human actions through a moral code, not science. The same credulity and servility that led Russia to support Stalin leads us to believe that right differs from wrong and that we must choose (or serve) that which is right.

3. Religion Was the Foundation of Society, Not an Addition to It

In his insightful essay, “Primitive Religion and the Origin of the State”[1] philosopher Marcel Gauchet goes a step farther, arguing that without religion there would be no state. He writes that “by going back in time to the religious tie between supernatural founder-givers and human heirs-debtors, we can elucidate the system of primitive links that produces the social space.” It was this debt to supernatural, irrational powers that created the very notion of acting in accordance with what is good. Whether all, or some, or none of the admonitions in Leviticus or the Koran are really moral is beside the point. They are part of humanity’s search, stretching to the invisible past, for guidelines or maxims that produce good actions and the structures to encourage them.

4. Atheists Do Believe

The question most often posed to atheists who complain about the presence of the Ten Commandments or a creche in public spaces is, “Since you don’t believe, why does it bother you so much?” This is the wrong question. The right question is, “Since you do believe, why does it bother you so much?” Because most atheists do believe, and I stress the word believe, that they are capable of understanding right from wrong. They provide no scientific justification for such a belief because no such scientific justification exists.

5. Science Can’t Teach Us Right from Wrong

Even if it were proven that there is a “generosity gene” or that there are evolutionary advantages to cooperative behavior, such things would not inform us how to act in a given situation. The activation of a gene or the selfless actions of our ancestors may well provide a subconscious impulse for moral action, but that impulse must still be translated to the conscious mind. Upon finding a $20 bill on the floor, we must still decide whether to keep it or look for its previous owner based on stories we tell ourselves. Science cannot tell us these stories, and the moment it tries to it becomes religion.

The idea of a cold finite existence ending in complete oblivion is not the harshest concept an atheist must swallow. Far more present and paralyzing is the notion that our actions are devoid of moral consequence. As Hitchens points out, so ingrained is our credulity towards morality and our servility to it that most people cannot ignore it. It is not merely silly superstitions that atheists seek to remove from our personal and policy choices, it is the idea that an objectively, morally correct choice is even possible. But even if we accept the premise that morality is entirely subjective, we still have to decide how to act.

6. Religion Complements Science, It Doesn’t Oppose It

This is where religion, far from being the natural enemy of science, comes to its aid. Just as believers must always fight nagging doubts about the truth of their beliefs, the atheist must fight nagging beliefs when confronted with moral choices. Just as there is no paradox in a believer knowing that science can reveal important details of how the physical world operates, there is no paradox in an atheist knowing that religion and its ancient history of moral investigation is relevant to moral understanding.

In his masterpiece “The Glass Bead Game,” Herman Hesse envisions a future Europe in which there are two basic powers. The first is the elite group of players of the game, a mysterious enterprise in which all of human knowledge is manipulated and combined to create pure, rational truths. The other is the Roman Catholic Church, which remains essentially unchanged in the world of the novel. Hesse knew that at some points the cold, rational understanding of the world must give way to metaphysical musings. The book’s central character stands between these two powers, influenced by both. Most Americans stand similarly between these obligations to science and to religion.

7. Ignorance of Religion Is Ignorance of History, For Atheists and Everyone

The systematic removal of religious texts, practices, and imagery from our public lives is not a worthy goal. When the Ten Commandments are placed on a wall, nobody believes they are the actual tablets Moses brought down from Sinai’s mount. They are a representation of an ancient message that one can believe is sacred or secular but that one cannot claim is insignificant. It is possible to encounter and explore a religious text without imbuing it with supernatural significance. Harold Bloom does just that in his insightful “The Book of J,” which explores the work of one Old Testament writer through the lens of literary criticism.

Secular approaches to religion such as Bloom’s are far superior to the idea of hiding religion from education or public discourse. We have to understand that for thousands of years our culture and every culture based its moral choices on very simple sets of stories—stories which many of us have stopped telling each other. That has a terrible effect on our ability to understand our culture and its past. Try reading “Moby Dick” without a working knowledge of the Bible. It becomes little more than a tall tale about fishing.

Showing respect for a person or culture’s religious beliefs, even if you disagree with him, is simple common courtesy. I am asking atheists to do much more. I am asking them to understand and embrace the role religion played in creating the world we live in, and to see that religion was not merely the author of good moral choices or bad moral choices but of the very concept of moral choice.

Later in his essay, Harris argues that “religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of global, civil society.” This, in a nutshell, is what atheists get wrong. It is only through religion, and its metaphysical, moral obligations that global society is possible at all. As Harris pulls the offending thread of religion out of the global moral tapestry, it falls apart, replaced only with his preferences. In the end the battle, between atheists and believers in the area of moral choice is little different than the battle between Jews and Muslims. All of us have contributions to make, and no side will ever prove its unique power to teach us how we should choose.

[1]Gauchet, Marcel, “Primitive Religion and the Origin of the State,” New French Thought,Lilla, Mark (1994).

Love - Not Just About Chemicals Anymore!

Here is some standard materialist thinking about emotionality.  In a nutshell:

1. Physical existence is the only kind of existence
2. People experience emotions, therefore
3. Emotions have a physical cause

For many years we have been hearing about the causal link between the experience of love and a chemical called Oxytocin. The story went something like this:

1. People have genes
2. Genes have a "drive" to reproduce
3. Evolution selected Oxytocin to help ensure that parents would care for their offspring
4. "Love" is really just Oxytocin tricking us into keeping our genes going

So leaving aside the high improbability of a functional gene ever randomly developing and not attempting to account for how a chemical arrangement like a gene would come to "want" something like reproduction and not bothering to ask how the species could have survived before it had evolved its Oxytocin, materialists have a new problem - Oxytocin, it seems, doesn't even do what they thought.

A science writer known as Neuroskeptic has recently published a piece in Discover entitled "Oxytocin: Two New Reasons For Skepticism."  Apparently, according to researcher James C. Christensen "quite a lot of previous Oxytocin research may be flawed."  Later in the study, Chistensen details how he and his team extracted and measured Oxytocin levels in people who were asked to play "the Prisoner's Dilemma" game (which requires participants to make decisions based on trust or lack thereof).  They assumed that there would be an obvious relationship between the Oxytocin levels and the level of trust but what they found was that there are "no significant correlations between Oxytocin and behavior."

And there's the rub.  Maybe there's not much of a correlation between chemicals in the body and behavior overall.  Could it be that chemical changes generally occur on the heels of emotional ones and not the other way around?  If so, what would then be the true source of our emotional experience?  Theists have long asserted that there is both a physical and non-physical component to a human being. These components work in tandem to create the full experience of being human. 

Science is at a loss as to how to explain many aspects of human behavior and experience .  The main reason for this lack of explanatory prowess is rooted in materialist assumption #1 above.  Once science comes to acknowledge that there are aspects of existence that are not rooted in physicality but rather in metaphysicality they may be able to explain the human experience of love.

Science is great, but always remember that it's constantly being revised.  Always take it with a few grains of salt when they make their proclamations - especially ones that seem to fly in the face of spiritual reality.