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Anti-Christ Anti-Scientist

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A few years back, National Geographic ran a photo essay on the Alaskan tundra. In the publication notes at the back, the photographer recounted a conversation with a native regarding the urban tourists that passed through each year. When asked to characterize them, the native, a man who lived in solitude for most of the year, remarked that “They seem lonely.” That loneliness reflects not a lack of human association Rather, it is a deep disconnection in our souls from the root of life.

This problem is so characteristic of modern societies that, in our search to escape our constructed reality, we tend to gloss over the defects of ancient cultures. Pagan worshippers extol the virtues of Roman worship for its naturalism, ignoring the paternalism that gave license to fathers to murder their dependents. The homeopathic intuition of native healers is lauded, ignoring the vicious lore of hexes and curses. And nobody appears to want to reflect that xenophobia was endemic to all the ancient cultures, with outsiders that looked and spoke differently treated as inferiors.

But if the ancient world mixed its spiritual vices and virtues, it is still fair to ask why the spread of modern civilization has resulted in a spiritual divorce. Naturally, critics seeking to heal the divide focus on the dominant elements of modern culture. I am sympathetic to these concerns:

  • Science applies methods of analytical reductionism to reveal creative possibilities. Unfortunately, reducing things to their constituent parts is not something that souls engage willingly: to do so would be a form of suicide. Therefore, science achieves its most impressive manifestations in the material realm. Scientists seeking funding for fundamental research have a strong motivation to ignore their failure to explain spiritual phenomena, and tend actually to pretend that souls just don’t exist.
  • Capitalism heralds the efficiency of the free market in responding to unforeseen public needs and opportunities. Unfortunately (as recognized by Adam Smith), the metric of success – the accumulation of wealth – is too crude to support political control of resource exploitation by the greedy. Worse, concentration of wealth has allowed the exploiters to broadcast rationalizations for their behavior, almost all of which cast the exploited resources as spiritually deficient, and therefore not deserving of protection.
  • The traditions of Abraham (dominated by Christianity in American society) tackle the problem of masculine aggression by heralding the power released through submission to unconditional love. Unfortunately, the target population persists in its aggressive recidivism, to the extent that scripture is often quoted selectively (when not completely rewritten) to justify destructive behaviors that are decried universally by the avatar(s). This perversion divorces us from the noblest masculine manifestations of spiritual maturity.

Given the problems outlined above, I would be surprised if it were impossible to assemble evidence that each of the three elements can facilitate depravity. The science of eugenics justified medical experiments on populations (both human and animal) that were considered to lack souls, and therefore believed to be unable to feel pain. Unbridled greed first drove the adoption of slavery in the New World – both of native populations and imported Africans, and now drives us pell-mell down the road to ecological collapse. And the “Great Commission” to propagate the good news of Christ’s resurrection has been used to justify violent suppression of indigenous cultures.

But is it fair to stop there? After all, is not the material construction of our modern reality, with its buildings, appliances and tools, far more conducive to liberty from fear than the natural world we inhabited previously with its predators, diseases, weather and natural disasters? Does not capitalism also distribute wealth and create monetary velocity that supports personal initiative, thereby providing an escape from exploitation? And have not the traditions of Abraham been foremost in providing charitable support of those in need?

For those seeking spiritual reconnection, this seems to leave us in a limbo of ambiguity. If we cannot find the seeds of disconnection in our history, then how are we to escape from the mistakes of the past?

The answer I have held out here is that the way out is to recognize that it’s not just about us.

One of the great gifts of the Bible is that it charts the progression of human spiritual maturity from the heralded “era of innocence” experienced by primitive cultures. In The Soul Comes First, I explain the Biblical days of creation as the history of the evolution of the senses as revealed by the souls that survived the experience. The Garden of Eden is a similar metaphor, in my view. It describes the ideal state sought by the pagans – man and spirit united to create a world of peace. But that unity is sundered by the serpent, who tempts the woman – the nexus of life-engagement – into partaking of the “fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” For that sin, man and woman are cast out of the Garden.

As I expressed it recently to a friend, the great tragedy of the Fall was the sundering of trust. That trust was not only between mankind and spirit, but between man and woman. Ever since, we have been engaged in the sterile course of trying to fix blame for the problem. What we fail to realize, however, is that the source of the problem existed before the Garden. We did not create the serpent, although we were susceptible to its wiles.

We were cast out of Eden not because application of our intelligence was evil, but because we had admitted sin as a guide to our intelligence. Rather than allowing Life to guide our intelligence for good, we became committed to a course of resolving the difference between good and evil, and of developing the strength to choose the good. This is an extremely dangerous path, and the spiritual collective decides that we must be cast out lest we partake of the “Tree of Life” and live forever.

Again, we can think of this in material terms, but from the perspective of the soul of life, this is to say “if man, having admitted the serpent into his mind, enters into the Soul of Life now, then we will never be rid of the serpent.” In Revelation, this aim is made quite clear: the serpent/dragon attempts at one point to assault heaven, and is ultimately destroyed in the final confrontation with Christ.

But what is the serpent? The best way to characterize it is in the contrast between reptilian and mammalian parenting: while the mammalian newborn is nurtured for weeks or years before being forced into independence, the baby Komodo dragon must climb a tree to avoid being eaten by its mother. The reptile manifests the virtues of the predator, seeing in others only resources to be consumed.

So the problem is not science, or capitalism, or Christianity – it is with the ancient reptilian spiritual infection that we must purge. It is our path, on the knowledge of good and evil, to master that influence. It is a skill first encouraged in Cain (“sin crouches at your door, but you can master it”) and delivered by Jesus to the Apostles when he says “what you loose here on earth will be loosed in heaven, and what you bind here on earth will be bound in heaven.”

But until we as a species accede to the disciplines taught by Christ, we will discover, the further we walk with sin down the path of knowledge, the more distant will become our relationships with the Spirit of Life. Not because we can be expected to do differently, nor as punishment for our weakness, but as a matter of its own self-preservation.

The Modern Tower of Babel

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I alluded to the problem of language in my introductory post on programming. The allusion was hopeful, in that our machines are learning to understand us. Or rather, they are learning to understand those of us that speak supported languages.

The dominant language of international discourse today is English. That can be attributed to the success of the English Empire in the colonial age, and then to the industrial and diplomatic dominance of America in the aftermath of World War II. But the proliferation of English has affected the language itself.

The most significant changes impacted many of the colonial languages: they were simplified and regularized to make them easier to teach. Study of tribal languages reveals that they defy analysis. Few patterns are discerned in verb conjugations, and sentence structure obeys arbitrary rules. But the languages of major civilizations can also be daunting: the ideograms and subtle intonations of Chinese are a case in point. For both types of language, it is impossible for an adult to become fully proficient. But the education of adult leaders and manual laborers was critical to the stability of Empire. In the absorption of foreign populations, the complexity of the original language was eroded by the logistics of minority control.

And yet today the Brits like to say that England and America are divided by a common language. While the grammar and basic terms of the language are shared, cultural development and ambition still drive change. The physical sciences are characteristic. While my professors focused on physics as applied mathematics, it was clear to me that it was also a foreign language, with arcane terms such as “Newton’s Third Law”, “Lagrangian” and “Hamiltonian” use to distinguish alternative formulations of the mathematics used to describe the motion of classical particles. As cultural developments, the latter two came to prominence because their mathematical formulations were generalized more readily to non-classical systems. And as regards ambition, we need only note that all three formulations bear the name of their originators.

But language can also be used consciously as a political tool. Newt Gingrich created the modern Republican media machine around 1990 by distributing cassette tapes each month with terms to be applied in derogating Democratic and lauding Republican policies. Many oppressed minorities encode their conversations to prevent authorities from interfering with the conduct of their lives, and those can emerge as full-blown languages in their own right (The “Ebonics” movement reflected such a development in America).

But in other cases, new usage arises as a form of entertainment. I had to ask my son to clarify the meaning of “sick” as used by today’s youth, and was surprised to discover that, as in Chinese, nuances of intonation were essential to understanding.

Most of these variations can be expected to be ephemeral. “Cool” was “sick” when I was growing up, and all attempts to obscure meaning will eventually founder on the rock of economic realities. People that can’t describe accurately the world around them seem bizarre if not outright insane, and ultimately excuse themselves from collaboration with others. While the linguists are fascinated by variation, they predict that the number of living languages will continue to decline.

As a programmer, however, I have the opposite experience. Fred Brooks and Martin Fowler have decried the “language of the month” phenomenon in software engineering. I myself feel a certain insecurity in my job search because the applications that I develop can only be created using fifteen-year-old technologies that most programmers would consider to be “archaic.”

To understand the root of this proliferation, it is amusing to backtrack to 1900 or so. Mathematicians had developed categories for numbers: the integers (used for inventory tracking), rational numbers (ratios of integers) and real numbers that seemed to have no repeating pattern. Two very important branches of mathematics had been proven to depend upon real numbers: geometry and calculus. In geometry, the real number pi is the ratio of a distance across a circle and the distance around it. In calculus, Euler’s constant e is the number that when exponentiated has a slope equal to the value at every point on the curve.

However, philosophers pointed out that while calculation of the exact value of these numbers was impossible, even in the case that we could, any calculation performed using them could only be performed with finite precision – and that is good enough. If we can’t cut a board to better than one thousands of an inch, it doesn’t matter if we calculate the desired length to a billionth of an inch. Practically, the architect only needs to know pi well enough to be certain that the error in his calculation is reasonably smaller than one thousandth of an inch.

Given that binary notation could be used to represent numbers as well as common numerals, it was clear that computers could be used for practical calculations. When Alan Turing defined a simple but comprehensive model for digital computation, the field progressed confidently to construct machines for general purpose applications, encompassing not only mathematics but also language processing.

Now in Turing’s model, the digital processor operates on two kinds of input: variable data and instructions. The variable data is usually read from an input at execution. The instructions could be built into the actual structure of the processor, or read in and interpreted at run-time. The machine that Turing built to crack the Nazi Enigma code was of the first type, but his general model was of the second.

Turing’s original specification had fairly simple instructions (“move tape left”, “move tape right”, “read value” and “write value”), but it wasn’t long before Turing and others considered more complex instruction sets. While after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer famously penned a poem comparing himself to “Shiva, the destroyer of worlds”, I can’t help but wonder whether the original computer designers saw the parallels with Genesis. Here they were, building machines that they could “teach” to do work for them. They started with sand and metal and “breathed life” into it. The synaptic relays of the brain that implemented human thought have operational similarities to transistor gates. Designs that allowed the processor’s output tape to be read back as its instruction tape also suggested that processors could modify their behavior, and thus “learn.”

The Turing test for intelligence reflects clearly the ambition to create a new form of intelligent life. But creating the instruction tape as a series of operations on zeros and ones was hopelessly inefficient. So began the flourishing of computer languages. At first, these were simply mechanisms for invoking the operation of blocks of circuitry that might “add” two numbers, or “move” a collection of bits from one storage location to another. Unfortunately, while these operations provided great leverage to programmers, they addressed directly only a small part of the language of mathematics, and were hopelessly disconnected from the language used to describe everything else from banking to baking.

Still fired with ambition, the machine designers turned to the problem of translating human language to machine instructions. Here the most progress was made in the hard sciences and engineering, where languages such as FORTRAN attempted to simulate the notation of mathematical texts. The necessary imprecision of business terminology was refined as COBOL, allowing some processes to be automated. And as machine architectures grew more complex, with multi-stage memory models, communication with external peripherals including printers and disk drives, and multi-processing (where users can start independent applications that are scheduled to run sequentially), C and its variants were developed to ease the migration of operating systems code through architecture generations.

These examples illustrate the two streams of language development. The first was the goal of recognizing patterns in program structure and operation and facilitating the creation of new programs by abstracting those patterns as notation that could be “expanded” or “elaborated” by compilers (a special kind of software) into instructions to be executed by the machine. So for example, in C we type

c = a + b;

To anyone that has studied algebra, this seems straight-forward, but to elaborate this text, the compiler relies upon the ‘;’ to find complete statements. It requires a declaration elsewhere in the code of the “types” of c, a and b, and expects that the values of a and b have been defined by earlier statements. Modern compilers will report an error if any of these conditions are not met. A competent programmer has skill in satisfying these conditions to speed the development of a program.

The other stream is driven by the need to translate human language, which is inevitably imprecise, into instructions that can be executed meaningfully upon zeros and ones. Why is human language imprecise? Because more often than not we use our language to specify outcomes rather than procedures. The human environment is enormously complex and variable, and it is rare that we can simply repeat an activity mechanically and still achieve a desirable output. In part this is due to human psychology: even when the repetitions are identical, we are sensitized to the stimulus they provide. We desire variability. But more often, it is because the initial conditions change. We run out of salt, the summer rains come early, or the ore shipped to the mill contains impurities. Human programming is imprecise in part because we expect people to adapt their behavior to such variations.

Both abstraction and translation have stimulated the development of programming languages. Often, they go hand-in-hand. Systems developers expert in the use of C turn their skills to business systems development, and find that they can’t communicate with their customers. C++ arose, in part, as a method for attaching customer terminology to programming artifacts, facilitating negotiation of requirements. When the relational model was devised to organize business transaction data, SQL was developed to support analysis of that data. And when the internet protocols of HTTP and HTML became established as the means to acquire and publish SQL query results in a pretty format on the world-wide web, languages such as Ruby arose to facilitate the implementation of such transactions, which involve a large number of repetitious steps.

What is amusing about this situation is that, unlike human languages, computer languages seem to be almost impossible to kill. Consider the case of COBOL. This language approximates English sentence structure, and was widely used for business systems development in the sixties and seventies. At the time, the language designers assumed that COBOL would be replaced by better alternatives, and so adopted a date format that ran only to the end of the century. Unfortunately, the applications written in COBOL became services for other applications written in other languages. The business rationale for the logic was lost as the original customers and developers retired, and so it was effectively impossible to recreate the functionality of the COBOL applications. As the century came to a close, the popular press advertised the “Year 2000” crisis as a possible cause of world-side financial collapse. Fortunately, developers successfully isolated the code that depended upon the original date format, and made adaptations that allowed continued operation.

This trend will be magnified by the economics of software solutions delivery. Unlike other industries, almost the entire cost of a software product is in the development process. Manufacturing and distribution is almost free, and increasingly instantaneous. This means that the original developer has almost no control over the context of use, and so cannot anticipate what kinds of infrastructure will grow up around the application’s abstract capabilities.

The popular ambitions for software reflect this reality. The ability to distribute expert decision making as applications operating on increasingly precise representations of reality, all in the context of data storage that allows the results to be interpreted in light of local conditions: well, this implies that we can use software to solve any problem, anywhere. Some people talk about building networks of digital sensors that monitor everything from the weather to our respiration, and automatically deploy resources to ensure the well-being of everyone everywhere on earth.

In the original story of Babel, the people of the Earth gathered together to build a tower that would reach to heaven. Their intention was to challenge God. The mythical effort was undermined when God caused people to speak different languages, thus frustrating their ability to coordinate their efforts. In the modern era, we in effect seek to approximate the Biblical God using digital technology, but our ambitions lead us to create ever more abstract languages that we cannot rationalize, and so we find our efforts frustrated by the need to backtrack to repair our invalid assumptions.

In the terms of the programming discipline we will propose, however, the fundamental problem can be put this way: the digital realm is an abstract representation of reality. Why basis do we have for believing that the applications created using those abstractions accurately translate the needs described by human users? If we can’t solve that problem of describing and analyzing that correspondence, then our software must inevitably become a form of black magic that rules over us.

Love Works Posted

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Just a note that I’ve uploaded the rest of Love Works. Click on the page link on the banner. The post explains the delay.

The document was originally created in OpenOffice, and the images acquired a grey background in the port to Word. At some point I’ll fire up my old laptop and break it apart in OpenOffice. If there’s an immediate need, let me know and I’ll push it up on the priority list.

The Trust Mind

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Hundreds of years before the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the mystics of Greek Hellenismos understood Humanity’s spiritual development as a growth into engagement with certain fundamental natural forces. Aphrodite, for example, was represented as a beautiful woman, but as a god mediated between humanity and the force of attraction, which manifests as much in gravitation as it does in sensual desire. Following the era of the Titans and Olympians, the aim of the mystics was to usher in the age of Dionysius, allowing men to interact directly with the principles. In other words, for us to become gods.

When this truth was first revealed to me, the speaker admitted that in the modern era, we view Dionysius, the “party god”, as an unlikely avatar. We view alcohol as a vice, but the Greeks saw it as a tool. When we are drunk, we “lose our inhibitions.” That may manifest itself in a tendency to orgy, but at a deep spiritual level reflects the loosening of the protective barriers around our souls. We surrender ourselves to trust, and so relate more freely and deeply than we would otherwise. (See this post by Irwin Osbourne for more on this experience.)

The power of this relation can be abused. Megalomania is one pathology. In “Ray”, the film biography of Ray Charles, one scene reconstructs a set in which a horn player stands up to take an impromptu solo in the middle of a number. The man was dismissed, not because he violated the integrity of the rendition, but because Ray recognized intuitively that the man was on heroin. Accused of hypocrisy, Charles’s retort was that he had to be the only one. A second pathology is dependency. In graduate school, a friend shared his experience of a teacher who drank incessantly, and actually could do chemistry well only in that state. It took me a while to figure out how to suggest that maybe the teacher wasn’t doing the thinking at all – that the alcohol enabled him to inject himself into a community of minds that tolerated his needs.

There are other methods to achieve this integration. A young woman can be almost suicidal in her disposition to trust the men that she desires, and when that is manifested in sexual license, she may serve as the pool in which men join. Junger’s book “War” documents the characteristics of men that survive constant threat only by surrendering themselves to trust in each other.

There is enormous power in such melding, but the methods listed above cannot be sustained by our physiology. The licentious woman becomes corrupted by masculine demons, and loses her beauty. Substance abuse drives our metabolism into pathways that destroy our health. And war is a process that no one escapes without harm, even if it is hidden deep in the soul behind a stoic mask.

It is for this reason that everdeepening.org opens with this statement:

Love dissolves the barriers of time and space, allowing wisdom, energy and understanding to flow between us, and embracing us with the courage, clarity and calm that overcomes obstacles and creates opportunities. When we open our hearts to one another, there is no truth that is not revealed, and to those that love themselves, no impulse to harm that cannot be turned to the purposes of healing and creation.

As a Christian, I see the ultimate human manifestation of this truth in the march of Jesus of Nazareth to the cross. And behind that sacrifice, I must see the yearnings of a perfect and unconditional love that invests itself in the realization of that truth in our lives.

But when picking up the Bible, it doesn’t take long to reach contradictory evidence. Taking Eden as a metaphor for a relationship of trust between the source of love and humanity, that trust is corrupted by the serpent, which appeals fundamentally to human selfishness. In God, we were gods, but Eve is encouraged [NIV Gen. 3:5] to “be like God, knowing good an evil.” For this breach of trust, Adam and Eve are dismissed from the garden, and punishments are heaped upon them.

What was so heinous about their crime? Was it worse than the slaying of Abel, for which Cain was allowed a lifetime of repentance? And what is so important about us that God would give Jesus as a sacrifice to the goal of our redemption?

To understand this, we have to understand the nature of thought. We have succumbed in the modern age to scientific materialism, and so hold that thought occurs in the brain. I know this not to be true: I relate frequently to thinking beings that have no bodies and no brains, and so must recognize that my brain is merely an interface to my soul. To facilitate the expression of will through my body, the operation of the brain must correlate completely with the thinking done by my spirit.

Thus I interpret “In the image of God he created them” [NIV Gen. 1:27] in this way: our bodies are a tool through which we manifest the will of our souls and – given the quote above – they operate most effectively when used to express love.

The problem is that every interface is a two-way street. While through our commitment to creative expression, we can bring truth and beauty into the world, the opposite can occur. In the experience of pain and suffering, we project thoughts back into God. In the expression of greed and lust, we corrupt the purity of love. This is articulated many times in the Bible: consider Noah, Exodus and Ezekiel. Rather than being remote and impervious, God suffers from our wrong-doing. The flood is thus a desperate move to rid himself of the irritation, as is the destruction of the Holy City through the witness of Ezekiel. While horrifying to us as humans, we might imagine that so must the bacterium feel when confronting the operation of the immune system.

The error of the Law is to interpret these actions as a judgment, as an evidence of sin. They are not. The effect is to destroy the material manifestations of the success of selfishness, revealing its sterility. They are actions taken to frustrate selfish personalities that attempt to prevent love from liberating and healing their abused captives.

This is “The Knowledge of Good and Evil” that brings death into the world. Lacking appreciation of the virtues of love, we chose not to trust in love. We demanded understanding. But understanding is gained only through experience, and experience requires expression of both good and evil. We are educating ourselves.

In the end, Christ gathers those that chose good into the fold of the perfect love that originates from the divine source. We join our shared memory and wisdom into a single holy mind, and heal the world of the disease of selfishness. Thus I do not interpret the Crucifixion as atonement for our sins. Rather, I believe it should be seen as a surrender to trust in love, a struggle waged most fiercely in the Garden of Gethsemane, and redeemed by the proof of the power of love in the Resurrection. Rather than an indictment of our frailty, it is meant to be an exhortation to manifest our own forms of greatness.

Trust in yourselves. Trust in love. Welcome yourselves into the Holy Spirit, the mind formed when that trust is perfected in us.

Beyond Good and Evil Round II: A Response to John Zande

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John:

The proposition of good and evil is not a functional moral dichotomy – there is simply too much conditionality in moral analysis. I think that there are really only two principles that inform a meaningful moral dialog. The first is power – the capacity to make reality conform to our will. The second is love – an irrational desire to create power in the object of our affection. Moral analysis focuses on “who are you loving with your exercise of power?” The ultimate moral condemnation is “only yourself.”

I do not deny that the world is full of pain, but that is an inheritance from our Darwinian past, which is a process free of morality. In Genesis, when the Bible heralds the Fall as the entry of sin into the world, it is to recognize a separation from that past into a future of rational moral analysis. “Adam and Eve” are a metaphor for the human struggle with shame, guilt, forgiveness and redemption (all in the context of human society – God doesn’t need to deal with these issues).

The question is whether there is a force that lifts us up from brutal biological competition toward rational moral discourse. The Christian proposition is that Jesus came and died to demonstrate that there is nothing that can alienate us from God’s love or qualify us for preferential treatment in his eyes. This was demonstrated even in the face of murder at the hands of the culture that he came most immediately to love. His victory was to create a foothold for divine love in the world, and that foothold has broadened enormously over time.

So my response to your position is: yes, things are still bad, but they are far better than they were. It is only by looking at the trends that one can form a judgment concerning the efficacy of love. I experience its power day-by-day in a world that you seem to not to experience.

You have a great deal of intellectual energy, which you seem to focus toward the purpose of creating pain in others. My experience is that such people often are “doing as was done unto them”, looking for someone strong enough to show them how to heal. I can only offer Hume’s response to Hobbes (the latter whom you echo, btw). Hobbes averred that life for most was a “war of all against all” and “nasty, brutish and short.” Hume’s response was: “Mr. Hobbes has forgotten the operation of his own heart.”

If you want a person committed to the proposition of loving to read your book, you should start by offering a testimony regarding the things that you do love. That’s a point of contact that might allow them to engage your view of the world.

As it is, those of us that love have improved enormously the condition of life on this Earth. We’re at a turning point in that process, having nearly exhausted the resources that were laid up in the past. Under those circumstances, it will ultimately be those that learn to work together that survive.

Brian

Zande’s response to this was an assertion that he was trying to clarify the true nature of the reality we inhabit. My response was:

John:

Thank you for your considered response. I find myself, however, still seeking a declaration of the allegiance of your love.

Truth is indeed terribly important. Those that divorce themselves from truth ultimately abandon power (the ability to make reality conform to our will). For those that love, the truth of suffering is an essential goad to action. But the truth is only what it is. The goal of any active intelligence is to create new truth. It is through creative action that I find greatest meaning in life, and my ability to create is largely contingent (in the “no man is an island” sense) on the good will of others. That means offering them good will in return.

From a Christian perspective: yes, in its foundational state, this creation was indeed a reflection of Lucifer’s character. But I see the action of Divine Love in the mechanisms that are provided to heal his insanity. It is the simple existence of that possibility that I celebrate.

Good luck on your journey!

Brian

Mr. Zande’s response was to ask me to remove my religion from his blog – which I found odd because the only religious statement was actually an affirmation of Mr. Zande’s thesis.

In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity

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I went out to Pasadena yesterday to Caltech, where the Skeptics Society held its annual conference. The theme was set by Michael Shermer, whose latest book “The Moral Arc”, framed the conversation.

Shermer’s basic premise is that charting the course of science shows that it correlates with an improvement in moral decision-making. I would tend to caution that correlation does not imply causation. But let’s look at how the conference speakers responded to that framing.

The first speaker, Don Prothero, raised an alarm about the dangers of science denial. We are skating on the edge of ecological disaster. Species extinction is occurring at a rate never before seen in the history of the planet, and global climate change threatens human survival as well. Prothero pointed the finger at science deniers who have impeded the implementation of policies such as those pursued by Germany and France to reduce their fossil fuel dependency. But where did the power to extract and consume so much fossil fuel come from, Dr. Prothero? From science, of course. In conversation, I also pointed out to him my sense that the political investments made by the Koch brothers probably reflect a basic understanding of the science of economics.

Ian Morris did not look deeply into the future, but commented on the correlation between social moires and energy consumption in foraging, farming and fossil fuel societies. He noted that the citizens in the last stage consume nearly 100 times as much energy as those in the first stage. Only farming societies tend to accept hierarchical structure, while foraging societies accept violence. The fossil fuel culture has created a kind of “sweet spot” for citizens that are largely free from violence and also allowed personal liberty (although that conclusion seems weaker if we look at what we’ve done to the rest of the animal kingdom – pigs, chickens and cows might beg to differ). The future depends greatly upon discovery of alternative sources of energy.

Jared Diamond framed his comments on the perception of danger against his experiences among the natives of New Guinea. His charming vignettes included the wisdom that parents in New Guinea allow their children choice. While I agree that far too much of our children’s time is prescribed for them, I found his admission that his household ultimately held 150 or so reptilian pets to reflect more an allowance for children to decide for their parents. The overall flow of the presentation, however, seemed to argue against Shermer’s hypothesis: the medical benefits of advanced cultures comes with emotional disassociation and irrational anxiety that is unknown in tribal cultures.

Carol Tavris offered an amusing and enlightening look at gender and sexuality. Mostly it was directed towards disassembly of social stereotypes regarding gender and sexuality. The most significant revelation for the attendees should have been the debunking of studies that suggested that sexual orientation was a biological predisposition rather than a choice. The intervening years have demonstrated that there is no biological factor that determines sexual orientation, and sociologists have described societies that have age groups that engage in homosexuality before entering into hetero adulthoods. Tavris also emphasized that feminine rights (with a focus on the frightening practice of castration and mutilation) depended upon economic opportunity for women. Both observations have significant political consequences, and led to turbid discussions regarding Western cultural imperialism.

John McWhorter was on far safer ground in considering the future of languages. Many languages will die, and attempting to preserve languages that are dying is a lost cause – their structure is simply too irregular for anyone to master who hasn’t learned them from the cradle. In fact, the relative elegance of many modern languages is related to the need to bring adult learners (emigrants) into the social system. The language had to be “dumbed down.” For this reason, McWhorter confidently states that Chinese, although the language spoken by the most people, would not overcome the tide of English. The tonal and contextual subtleties of Chinese make it impossible for an adult to master.

After the lunch break, Shermer and Richard Dawkins had a conversation that was advertised to consider the future of religion, but became rather focused on the suitability of Darwinian theory as a moral weathervane. It was nice for Dawkins to admit that he would allow for an advanced alien species (a type of “God”), but that it would have to have arisen out of evolution. I found the discussion to be frustrating, and stood up in the Q&A to offer that human behavior and evolutionary success is driven by Lamarckian processes (due to the enormous plasticity of the brain, human adults pass traits acquired during their lifetimes on to their children). While competitive selection still applies in human society, attempting to use Darwinian processes to explain human morality is a broken proposition.

Esther Dyson gave humble and uplifting introduction to the work that she is doing in trying to change the systems that cultivate poor health choices in the economically disadvantaged segments of our society. She shied away from any claims to scientific process. I had to stand up and applaud the empathy demonstrated by her choice to feel the pain of these people, and respond by wading in to do something.

My assessment of Leonard Krauss was summed up in person to him. Since I left the field of particle physics in 1990, I have become concerned that physicists talk about mathematical constructs as though they were observed physical fact. Krauss agreed that was an issue, but when I asked what the corrective was, he simply said “people lose their funding.” I did try to introduce some of the concepts I’ve outlined here. The conversation was an experience that hopefully will prepare me to do better in the future.

David Brin was to talk about privacy and security, but ended up developing a philosophical framework for political action. I found his presentation to be fascinating, in that I think that he was actually trying to deal with moral complexity that the others escaped by narrowing their focus. However, it wasn’t terribly scientific: Brin’s claim that developed nations have a “diamond shaped” power structure (a broad middle class) ignores the third-world critique that we’ve merely exported our poverty (globally, the pyramidal structure still applies). Brin did characterize the war on the middle class as an upper-class “putsch”, and considered that a reflection of behavior held over from our Darwinian past. I was heartened by one particular marching order: liberals need to reclaim Adam Smith, whose thinking has been corrupted by the neo-conservatives.

Gregory Benford spoke about the future of space travel. He echoed Prothero with an alarm that if we don’t start pulling our space junk out of orbit, the gateway will close: we won’t be able to launch rockets through the debris generated by colliding fragments. He then considered economic models for resource extraction from the asteroid belt, which are apparently related to long-term (100 million years) plans to boost the earth from its orbit so that it won’t be dried out as the sun heats. As for the prospect for travel to other solar systems, Benford invoked the lack of foresight of Thomas Jefferson, who thought it would take 1000 years for Americans to settle the continent, and the importance of the explorer spirit to human culture: politics, rather than science.

Returning now to the framing set by Shermer, I offer this: science is the study of the behavior of things that lack personality. It has long been recognized that the stepchildren of political and social science struggle because the participants don’t sit still long enough to be studied – introduce a change in the system, and they’ll change their behavior. So while trying to manage morality must be a rational exercise, this conference offered weak indications that scientific practices are going to have an impact. Where the question of the basis of morality was addressed, it was in gross abstractions that were often contradicted by the evidence offered by other speakers.

The lesson that I would hope a skeptic would draw from this is that they should have far more sympathy for the struggles faced by leaders of religious and political organizations. St. Augustine, for example, was a rational philosopher whose thought shaped moral discussion for more than a thousand years. His writings might be worthy of consideration.

The danger of convocations such as the Skeptics’ Conference is that they create an echo chamber. The fact is that most of society cannot keep up with the developments described by these worthy speakers: we lack either the mental capacity or the time. In that context, ritual and mystery are essential and valuable props to social development. So don’t tell Christians that they are unscientific. Tell them that we need intelligent design, and since they are exhorted to be Godly, why not get into the game ourselves?

He Will Reign – Won’t He?

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One of the challenges in building a brand is to ensure that prospects receive a consistent message concerning value proposition. The Church fathers and Emperor Constantine addressed this problem in the fourth century, establishing the Nicean dogma and creed that the Catholic Church and its heretical variants enforced through preaching, training and – in the breach, until recently – torture and death.

Normally, we’d talk of offended authority as “spinning in the grave.” In this case, given the last, we must be glad for Jesus’s resurrection, because otherwise the globe would have been whirling around his tomb.

The early Church fathers, confronted with the evidence of civil decay following the decline of the Roman Empire, seem to have concluded that empire was a part of God’s plan of salvation. They spent the twelve centuries following Nicea working to centralize political authority in Europe. At the end of that era, Renaissance Europe sprouted a dozen kingdoms capable of reproducing the accomplishments of Rome. Their response to Church meddling was to interfere in Papal selection, and when coming out on the losing end of that struggle, to support the rise of reforming heresies.

So what might Christ think of that?

In Scripture, I see three high points in the relationship between Humanity and God. The first is in Eden, where Adam and Eve experienced the ravishing grace of a direct relationship with God. Next is the era of Judges immediately following the entry into the Promised Land. The Hebrews as a people lived in gratitude for the Father’s gift, and when their occupancy was threatened, God found heroes to guide them through danger. That era ended with the people throwing their trust onto the human institution of monarchy. In the final act, Jesus arrives to expose the iniquity of the human institutions of his day, and proclaims that redemption is not bound by any contract or tradition, but is available to all the peoples of the Earth.

The modern Dominionist interprets this proclamation as a call to spread the institutions of Christianity across all the globe. The question is: what is the true church? Or is it simply enough that each individual should recognize Christ as lord and master in his heart?

Jesus is a little coy on this point, stating [John 10:14-16]:

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me — just as the Father knows me and I know the Father — and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also.

In The Soul Comes First, I consider the parallels between the spiritual trajectory in Judaism (culminating with Jesus) and Buddhism. In Islam and Christ, I examine the choices made in the formulation of Islam, choices made to facilitate such developments in cultures still practicing polytheism.

These insights, supported by the evolution of the covenant recorded in the Bible, lead me to the conclusion that Unconditional Love reaching to us from Christ meets us where we are. It does not care about structures and institutions, and in fact idolatry is often evident in human attempts to sustain those forms. Rather, as Jesus says, it enters into our lives in twos that grow into threes, thereby empowering us to care for one another.

Witnessing the end of this process, John testifies of the “New Jerusalem”, that {NIV Rev. 21:22]:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

Remember that Jesus does not ask us to submit, but to learn [NIV Matt 11:29]:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

And [Math 20:28]

…the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The temple of God is the individual human heart. His age is consummated when we allow his sensibility to enter into us. As I said recently to a priest:

Sometimes words serve no purpose, and the only thing I can do is to allow the broken heart of Christ within me to speak for itself.

It is when we offer our hearts as he did, offering them in the service of supporting the weary and burdened, that his will for us is achieved. This is a service beyond understanding, for we cannot explain all the suffering in the world. It is beyond us, having its origins billions of years ago, and woven into our living through the predatory competition that is Darwinian evolution. All that we can do, as Jesus did, is to offer ourselves in the service of healing the wounds it has created.

So is the modern fragmentation of Christianity – exposing contradictory messages that erode faith – is that fragmentation a problem? Or should it be interpreted as the process by which Christ dissolves the human institutions that stand between the seeker and Unconditional Love? If Eden was the ideal, should we not be seeking to recreate that ideal for every man and every woman? And if that is the goal, how can we doubt Christ’s word that he will gather all of his flocks – all of those traditions that declare a covenant and discipline that opens our hearts to the power of Divine Love – how can we believe that any one of them will be unreconciled to Christ? Or judge any of them as inferior to our own path?

The Battle Over Personality

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In attempting to penetrate the cultural prejudices against spiritual experience, I sometimes feel a certain historical sympathy for those arguing against flat-earthers. The doubter could argue against the roundness of the earth by insisting that he has never had any reason to believe that the world isn’t flat. That his experience was limited to a ten-mile radius around his place of birth didn’t matter much.

Against declarations of faith in the existence of God, the scientific materialist will often say things like “Well, I know that when I jump off a bridge, I’ll fall into the river. You can’t say that about God.” When I describe my experience of spirituality, including events that can’t be explained by accepted scientific theory, I am told “Well, it’s OK for you to believe in God.” That these events are just as real to me (and others that have witnessed them) as jumping off a bridge seems to escape their grasp. I really don’t need anyone’s permission to have them – and as scientists shouldn’t they be at least at little bit curious as to why I do and they don’t?

I have suggested that Christ doesn’t create faith through force – but rather by posing people a problem bigger than they can solve, and then giving the power to solve it. When my children worried to me about my financial circumstances, I always said to them “Well, money is only a means of storing power – and all my power is wrapped up in trying to solve a very, very difficult problem. There’s just none left over to save.” But because love does not wait, I am confident that if the problem can be solved at this point in history, it will be solved. Otherwise, well, I’ll have left some bread on the water for when I come back to try again.

So I might suggest that the difference between me and those that judge my faith is humility. Scientists are really proud of their science, and of the skills and strength of mind that allows them to apply it. Conversely, my experience includes being told by a fortune teller one night “Brian, we know that you think that you’re failing, but try and remember what it would have been like if you hadn’t been here at all.”

So if the problem for the scientist is pride, do they have no basis for their pride? I would say that, yes, they do have a basis for pride. We have turned the world into a garden, and so tend to forget that nature is just a terribly destructive place. Science – which is the study of the behavior of things that don’t have personality – has allowed us to mitigate against disease, predation and the elements, and helped us to anticipate and manage natural disasters. That success is obtained with theories that completely ignore personality. So we think of the animals in a stock yard as simple meat factories. The trees that we chop down are just wood.

The value of the scientific pursuit is, of course, to extend our lives, but it does so at the cost of our spirituality. Living is the opportunity to do work on our souls through the experience of having a body. We need to reclaim that ground from the scientific mindset that sees us as simple flesh popsicles, dancing on the axonic threads that originate in our brains. We need to reclaim our personality – which is to say the conscious engineering of our souls through engagement with the physical reality around us.

And when we have surrendered our pride and greed, an even greater adventure awaits us: calling out of hiding those spirits that we have terrorized with our science, and bringing their skills to bear in creating a garden that serves all the forms of life on Earth, rather than just humanity.

Truth in Creation

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Reconciling science and spirituality is a fool’s quest. The peace-maker is confronted with antagonistic camps both convinced that they are in possession of truth. Telling the two camps that they are half-right means that both of them try to shout you down.

Scientists base their claim to inerrancy on their method of discovery. They argue that to understand the world, we must first describe it. Analysis of our records may reveal patterns of experience: for example, certain types of “clouds” may bring “rain”; other types of clouds do not. The scientist codifies those conjectures as falsifiable statements. For example, “strato-cumulus clouds do not bring rain.”

Now these conjectures are important to societies because predicting rainfall is essential to agriculture. Bad predictions are not just a philosophical matter: if grain is planted at the wrong time, the community may suffer, or even perish. Thus the sophisticated scientist receives social approval and perhaps power. This enables them to attract followers to aid them in extending the reach and accuracy of their predictions.

Scientists tend to forget that creative connection. Society does not reward scientists for discovering the truth. It rewards them because possession of understanding enables truth to be created. The community is grateful not because it understands clouds, but due to the increase in the overall yield of their crops.

When scientists argue, society can determine the truth of their claims only by running experiments. In a wise culture, sudden change is not often pursued. Rather, most grain will be planted according to established methods, and each scientist will be granted a portion to manage according to his theory.

Now comes the real difficulty: let’s suppose that one scientist plants his grain in rich soil, and the other plants in sand. Obviously, the yield will be affected by those differences. To prevent these other factors from confounding comparison of their results, scientists attempt to control carefully the initial conditions. Ideally, they would be granted alternate rows in the field.

But there’s another condition that is necessary to the success of science. Let’s suppose that the genetic code of plants was unstable. While the example is ludicrous, imagine that seeds taken from corn might sprout as apples in the next generation, and then as thistle. Or worse – what if the corn turned into thistles mid-way through growth?

The scientist might say “Well, that’s not what happens,” and go happily on his way. But the problem is that this is exactly how people develop. Parents do not produce duplicates, we learn from experience, and we change our view of the world as we age.

In part for this reason, scientists have come to distrust the evidence of their senses. The variability of human sensation means that two observers may see different colors, hear different pitches, and judge weight differently. These discrepancies become critical when scientific theories move beyond simple correlations to precise mathematical prediction of timing and effect (such as became possible with Newton’s theory of gravitation).

Furthermore, our bodies are composed of smaller elements, and obviously our senses cannot penetrate the mechanisms of their own operation. Understanding of those mechanisms enables us to design sensors with finer and more reliable operation than the human senses. Scientific instruments are far more accurate than the human senses.

The advocate of religion considers all of this activity, and while often grateful for the bounty that science makes possible, observes that it has absolutely no impact on human behavior. Worse, science amplifies the destructive capacity of predators. Because it is far easier to break and wound than it is to create and heal, science makes antisocial behavior far more deadly. The great wars of the twentieth century are proof of this thesis. In our time, we can see the effect of tyrannies that wage war on their populations in the developing world.

This is amplified by personal experiences that beset people that the scientist would consider to be “undisciplined” in their thinking, or perhaps just weak of mind. The scientist has tools for organizing his thoughts: logic, dispassion, and rigorous terminology. This makes him often immune to the experience of the scullery maid on the estate of the nobility. This was characterized for me by an Englishman who offered that servants were told “for their own protection” to turn to the wall when a great lord passed.

I had a related experience during my post-doctoral research, being invited to a meeting with a new employee. I found myself wondering “Why am I here? This has nothing to do with me.” The fellow suddenly turned to me, a look of wonder on his face, and my supervisor broke up the meeting. As he left, my peer said “Gee, thanks.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, having never met someone that was capable of turning my mind. Having “grown up” somewhat now, I refuse to dance with women under the influence of alcohol because they fall into me and can’t get out.

It is in their need for protection of their personality that the “weak-minded” turn to religion. They lean on the strength of the great spiritual avatars that emanate a protective love. Being told by a scientist that they are delusional is a complete contradiction of their experience of life, and in many cases attacks the basis for trust in the relationships that they depend upon for survival. Is it at all unusual that some among the faithful see science as a tool of the devil?

So let’s return to the original problem: how do we reconcile science and spirituality? The scientist finds power in controlling the parts of reality that lack personality. The religious leader finds power in preventing conflict among the population that does the actual work. In both cases, the society benefits not because the truth is known, but because new and creative possibilities are revealed.

Am I the only one that perceives mutually supportive endeavors? Without love, science destroys more then it creates. Without knowledge, religion cannot protect us from the harsh realities of nature.

The scientist allows us to make objects that would never be found in nature. The religious leader builds communities that work in harmony. In combination, they enable us to create a world that we can all live with. Why don’t we stop arguing and get on with it?

The Soul Comes First

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Particularly during life’s difficult moments, religion is a source of comfort for us. When a child dies, when we lose a job: we are sustained by the relationships and wisdom that we develop in worship, study and charitable work.

Because this aspect of religion is so important to us, we seek in scripture for meaning that applies to us in our lives as human beings. We tend to emphasize that part of the story, and when we don’t find what we’re looking for, maybe even expand our searching into parts of the story that don’t really apply to us.

But if spirit is a part of the natural world, a form of consciousness woven into the very fabric of space, why should intelligence have manifested only here on Earth, in humanity? If spirit began evolution when the universe formed, or even earlier, it stands to reason that it’s got a long history of its own. What would coming to a planet be like? How would spirit go about learning about a new world? How would it go about improving itself through that investment?

When I re-read the Bible after developing a physical model of spirit (not really a theory, because the mathematics needs to be elaborated), I saw it in this light. The Bible made a whole lot more sense to me than it did when I turned away from it as a teenager.

That understanding is captured in The Soul Comes First, which you’ll see as a link on my sidebar.

Now the Bible is a complex book, with a lot of ideas in it. Summarizing it in seventy pages, even when looking at it from 30,000 feet, means compressing a lot of ideas into very few pages. So it’s heavy going. Here’s the short skinny:

  1. This reality was designed as a place of healing for souls infected by selfishness.
  2. The creation myth in Genesis records the investment of a collection of such souls as they explored the Earth through the evolving senses of living creatures.
  3. The founding of monotheism through Abraham is about creating masculine strength in a culture dominated by powerful women.
  4. The Old Testament, from Exodus on, records the expansion of monotheism as a national culture. The investment made by God at this point was in creating a capacity to reason through adherence to the law. The experiment failed for various reasons – the most significant being the desire of the people to centralize human authority. This eventually led to demotion of spiritual leadership in favor of political leadership, and destruction of the nation.
  5. Jesus came to demonstrate that love will overcome any system of tyrannical laws. Not only did he demonstrate the power of love through miracles, he trained a collection of men (the Apostles) to emulate his mastery.
  6. The Book of Revelation is exactly what John said it was: he was taken up to heaven, where the angels shared with him their relationship to and experience of Christ.. The visions of the seals are interpreted as the forms of selfishness that the infected angels brought to the Earth with them; the trumpeted disasters are the extinction episodes revealed to us by paleontology; the bowls describe the exhaustion of the natural resources humanity is exploiting.

Items 2 and 6 establish that paleontology and evolution science have revealed things that were known to the ancients long before we had the science to study them.