Postmodernism: An Apology

For some time I have wanted to write on postmodernism, or rather on the attack on it. Although I have obliquely addressed the subject before, I have been surprised at the seemingly universal revulsion afforded to postmodernism. I also must admit that I feel a bit defensive of postmodernism, not least because its critics seem to me to avoid the most central premises of postmodernist thinking. First, however, I’d like to sample some of the ways postmodernism comes under fire.

Here is one example, a quote from RichardDawkins.net on why people should give to Richard Dawkins' non-profit foundation for reason and science:

Other opposition to science comes from a needling hostility to the very idea that there exists an objective reality, a reality about which we can obtain testable evidence. There are those who carry this politically motivated hostility to the lengths of valuing personal opinion, subjective feeling or just plain prejudice, over publicly testable evidence. “If astrology works for you, it is true for you.” Never mind whether there is any evidence that it works (there isn’t). If you are personally revolted by the suggestion that you are related to a monkey, your illogical conclusion that evolution must therefore be false is mistakenly ascribed just as much respect as a contrary opinion supported by very strong evidence. “Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and all opinions are equally valid.”

Another quote comes from Rebecca Newburger Goldstein:

I like to think that the shallower aspects of the intellectual scene of the last century have played themselves out. I mean in particular the assaults on objectivity and rationality, which often take the form of attacks on science. There's nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves—this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There's something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences. It's not, of course, that novels will all address scientific themes—that would be ridiculously restrictive. But I hope that the spirit of expansiveness that's associated with the pursuit of scientific truth can get infused into the arts and humanities.

As a third example, here is Steven Pinker in a review of an essay collection on "Darwinian Lit-Crit":

Fiction has long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and the current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to its denial of that truism. The field’s commitment to the dogma that the mind is a blank slate and that all human concerns are social constructions has led it to focus on cultural and historical particulars, banishing the deeper resonances of fiction that transcend time and place. And its distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable hypotheses and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according to many accounts, mired in faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism.

The three examples above all come from people on the science side of the spectrum, although Goldstein is rather a science-minded philosopher and novelist. Let me provide one more example, this time from well-known conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg:

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

These are four strong statements dismissing something that hardly seemed faddish when I was in graduate school for literary studies. In its various forms in deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, postcolonialism, gender and queer theories, and other permutations, postmodernism was taken quite seriously. I took it seriously. So did many of my professors. This is not to say that I or anyone necessarily became a fawning devotee of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, or anyone else. Some of us were skeptical, some were hostile, but most everyone thought that postmodernist ways of approaching literature and culture were worth thinking about.

They are still.

Let me then try to identify some common threads in the views of postmodernism expressed in the four examples above:

(1) Postmodernism opposes or challenges science.

(2) Postmodernism expresses skepticism at the idea of objective reality (or, better, "interrogates" it).

(3) Postmodernism promotes the idea that all opinions are equally valid.

(4) Postmodernism argues that all human concerns are social constructions.

To these four points we can add that Dawkins, Goldstein, Pinker, and Goldberg all seem to agree about the character of postmodernism. It is nonsensical, essentially political, and self-deceptive; in other words, it is really, really wrong.

Not that anyone's asked me to do so, but I'll make myself an apologist for postmodernism. Let's look at the four common thread points:

(1) Postmodernism opposes or challenges science.
This is not true, in my opinion, yet I feel there's nothing inherently wrong with those outside the natural sciences questioning and criticizing what science issues as its facts, methodologies, and philosophies. Nevertheless, postmodernism generally does raise matters that surely must trouble science because the whole enterprise of science as a separate and absolutely definable discipline comes under interrogation. If I may be forgiven for simplifying matters too much, postmodernism opposes and challenges not science but truth claims. For example, when biologist Jerry Coyne says that "evolution is true," we can agree with the claim at a factual level and yet also recognize that "evolution" is itself an ever-evolving understanding of how life on Earth developed. The postmodernist opposition and challenge is not to the factual status of the claim but to the idea that the statement is always true and only in a specific way. As evolution continues to be refined and older questions become resolved, the definition of evolution will also develop. The statement "evolution is true" means different things in 1859 and 2009, even though the words are the same. Unfortunately, I think often people use science as a generic, default term when they try to explain postmodernist attitudes to truth. To challenge science is radical, controversial, and sexy - I guess.

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HOWEVER, we can take a bit from über-postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard and wonder if my "postmodernism doesn't oppose science" stance is mere wishful thinking and woefully inaccurate. Lyotard is quoted as having said:

Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other social formations.

The discerning reader will observe that Lyotard makes a more nuanced point than "science has been wrong before; therefore, modern science will be proven wrong in the future." Rather, his point is that social and cultural values influence not only scientific communities (which is unsurprising), but also the production of scientific knowledge (which is more suprising). I happen to agree with Lyotard that science is a set of conventions and a discourse. After all, this is the cultural aspect of science and its performance. While Lyotard may certainly be attacking science, the truth claim lies at the center of the critique. Lyotard certainly makes a strong claim, but I do not read him as rejecting the idea of objective reality, an idea we will discuss in more detail below.

* * * * * *

(2) Postmodernism expresses skepticism at the idea of objective reality.
I don't doubt that hard-core postmodernists jettison the idea of objective reality altogether. But I think most other postmodernists question our human ability to access objective reality using language, whether it be natural or even mathematical language. All language is imprecise and, as I asserted above, subject to change (to say nothing of misunderstanding). In other words, objective reality exceeds our linguistic systems. We don't seem to be able to say anything about objective reality that isn't either inconsistent or incomplete. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily that language constructs reality - another idea that gets treated below - but instead that it frames both our perceptions and our understandings of it. Reality isn't subordinate to language; however, language's effect is the perception of subordinating reality. The fiction that postmodernism exposes is that language is neutral, stable, and precise.

Postmodernism also notes, rightly, that we often talk about objective reality in almost transcendental terms, in the sense that it is supposed to be the thing outside our human systems that nevertheless provides an ultimate foundation and reference for these systems. I think this is an astute observation that helps us use language more consciously, that helps us avoid facile expressions that seem to portray some things as possessing intention or transcendence when they really do not have such properties.

(3) Postmodernism promotes the idea that all opinions are equally valid.
I tend to think of this as a straw man argument, a bad sound bite of a more important idea. As I understand postmodernism, the idea promoted is not that all opinions are equally valid but rather that no one opinion is fully and completely valid always and everywhere. Indeed, I like to think most postmodernists would agree with the substance of Isaac Asimov's great statement about our ever-developing knowledge, "right and wrong are fuzzy concepts." As I said in my comments to the first point, not the factual content of an opinion but its use and its disposition for those asserting it are the important matters. When Jonah Goldberg rails against postmodernism's critique of "Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false" - well, what are these implied understandings of which he speaks? He tacitly assumes we know what these understandings are. He seems to imagine that we will be outraged that anyone dares question these long-standing beliefs. Yet there seems to be some disjunction, for he uses the plural understandings. Perhaps he is a bit postmodern himself. Perhaps he's not sure what the Capital-T truth is among these traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false.

I think the postmodern stance on opinions can be explained also through the metaphor of grammar. If we want something to act as the subject of a sentence, we know we need a noun phrase in the nominative case: John, who, the bear, physics, love, a sleeping bee, colorless green ideas, and so on. Are some noun phrase subjects more valid than others? Perhaps, in the context of the rest of the sentence. But the point is that so long as something is a noun phrase and nominative, it can go into the subject position of a sentence. Just as a subject does something, does some work, so too does an opinion. Any opinion in its context will not only issue content but also perform work of an ideological, social and political nature. We don't need to go much farther here because the point is actually quite simple: it's not just about what the words of the opinion mean, it's also about the use to which the opinion is put.

(4) Postmodernism argues that all human concerns are social constructions.
More than the other points, the social constructionism idea seems to drive people batty against postmodernism. To understand the idea, read a great summary such as Paul Boghossian's:

To say of something that it is socially constructed is to emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. It is to say: This thing could not have existed had we not built it; and we need not have built it at all, at least not in its present form. Had we been a different kind of society, had we had different needs, values, or interests, we might well have built a different kind of thing, or built this one differently. The inevitable contrast is with a naturally existing object, something that exists independently of us and which we did not have a hand in shaping.

There are certainly many things, and facts about them, that are socially constructed in the sense specified by this core idea: money, citizenship and newspapers, for example. None of these things could have existed without society; and each of them could have been constructed differently had we so chosen.

The controversial part of social constructionism comes when the concept is applied to belief, as in beliefs about gender and race. Boghossian writes:

Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1953) and other feminist scholars since, have illuminated the extent to which gender roles are not inevitable but are rather the product of social forces. Anthony Appiah (Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 1996, with Amy Gutman) has been particularly forceful in demonstrating that nothing physical or biological corresponds to the racial categories that play a pervasive role in our social lives, that these categories owe their existence more to their social function than they do to the scientific evidence.

Other claims are more controversial. Mary Boyle has argued that our belief in schizophrenia is socially constructed (Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? 1990). Her claim is that there is no adequate reason to believe that the symptoms commonly lumped under this label are manifestations of a single underlying disease and, hence, that the search for its etiology by neurochemistry is doomed. Perhaps she is right: our understanding of mental illness is certainly in its infancy. On the other hand, there appears to be increasing evidence that the symptoms associated with schizophrenia are predictable significantly before their onset and that the condition is highly heritable. These facts point in the opposite direction.

The real question is whether social construction applies to everything, including knowledge from the natural sciences (see Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and Richard Rorty). Boghossian quite fairly concludes:

At its best – as in the work of de Beauvoir and Appiah – social constructionist thought exposes the contingency of those of our social practices that we had wrongly come to regard as inevitable. It does so by relying on the standard canons of good scientific reasoning. It goes astray when it aspires to become either a general metaphysics or a general theory of knowledge.

I also think it's helpful to quote a section from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that cites new directions for social construction:

Constructionist Explanation and Integrative Models
Fitting the social construction of human traits or kinds together with an account of representations, we see that one can be more or less thoroughgoingly constructionist. Social role accounts of traits or kinds may be paired with constructionist accounts of the representations that structure the social roles, and indeed, this is the natural way to read much constructionist work: work that is committed to explaining both theories of human kinds and the traits those theories purport to explain by appeal to social agents. One might hold, for example, that both our theories about gender and the differential behavior those theories structure are products of social construction.

But, as we noted above, some naturalists concerned with explaining representations have suggested integrative models combining constructionist and cognitive (and sometimes nativist) explanations of those representations (e.g. Sperber 1996, Machery and Faucher 2005). When combined with social role accounts of human traits, such accounts offer the possibility of combining (partially) nativist accounts of representations of human traits or kinds with fully constructionist accounts of the traits or kinds those representations create via the production of social roles (Mallon 2003, 2007). Such an account not only offers a way of integrating constructionist accounts with work in evolutionary cognitive psychology, but also offers an avenue of rejoinder to Hacking's claim that the targets of the social sciences are “on the move.”—viz., that representation-structured social roles and the traits they explain are stabilized, in part, by the developmental stability of the cognitive mechanisms that help produce them.

Social Construction as Ultimate Explanation
The canonical way to understand social constructionism about human traits is as suggesting that human traits emerge from experience of the world and as emphasizing the role of culture in structuring the world so experienced. Such constructionism thus contrasts with nativist accounts of those traits.

Recent work by some scientists and philosophical naturalists have suggested a different role for social, cultural forces in shaping less proximal, more ultimate (but still naturalistic) explanations. The distinction between a proximal and ultimate explanation is one that indicates relative distance of the explanans from the explanandum. For example, one's eating the doughnut might be explained by one's desire for rich foods (a relatively proximal explanation), but it also might be explained as the product of the evolutionary pressures that produced such desires (a relatively ultimate explanation). While “ultimate” is frequently used to label organic evolutionary explanations (because they contrast with proximal explanations that invoke only intrinsic properties of an organism), recent work suggests the possibility that culture might provide relatively more ultimate explanations of some evolved traits. For example, Philip Kitcher (1999) suggests that a cultural practice of dividing persons into racial groups could itself result in biologically significant divisions among populations where those cultural practices result in significant reproductive isolation. Kitcher's point is simply that, in principle, such isolation allows biological differences among populations to be preserved and accumulate over time. While Kitcher expresses skepticism about whether this has actually occurred among contemporary populations that we think of as candidate races (e.g. contemporary American groups picked out by “black,” “white,” “Asian,” etc.), his model does suggest a possible role for culture as an ultimate explanation, one that shapes the evolution of traits.

In a different vein, recent work on niche construction—the process by which organisms successfully modify their environments in ways that benefit themselves and their offspring (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003)—has also suggests a role for culture in altering natural selection. While key examples of niche selection emphasize a role for artifactual culture or technology in shaping selection—for example, the cultural adoption of dairy farming creating selective pressure for lactose tolerance (Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza 1989, Holden and Mace 1997)—the niches may also be more or less structured by our cultural conceptions, including our conceptions of different kinds of person.

In a controversial recent paper, Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (Cochran et al. 2006) have argued on the basis of a range of evidence that cultural practices of racial classification and discrimination against Jews in 9th to 17th century Eastern Europe created selective pressure for higher IQs but also certain genetic diseases (e.g. Tay-Sachs) linked to high IQ, specifically among Ashkenazi Jews (the authors argue that Ashkenazi Jews were very reproductively isolated by cultural practices during that period). Such a hypothesis combines Kitcher's suggestion of the biological significance of intracultural reproductive isolation that socially constructed racial classification may produce with the niche selectionist idea that culture may produce selective pressures resulting in biological adaptation. Work like Kitcher's, the niche selectionists', and Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending's is noteworthy in part because it is in a certain sense social constructionist, but because of its emphasis on social agents as ultimate rather than proximate causes, it is still quite jarring to many with social constructionist sensibilities.

This has been a long section with many quotes, but the ultimate point is that culture plays a central role in shaping human social environments, behaviors, identities and development. I don't think that anyone denies this point, and the point forms an answer to all four issues with postmodernism.

To move forward, the question is whether we are capable of arriving at objectively reasonable beliefs about how things are, beliefs that anyone would feel bound to regardless of their ideological perspective. To approach such a goal, there would need to be broad and un-coerced appreciation of what defines relevant evidence.

Even if social constructionism drives one batty, I think it's a positive value if it or other postmodernist approaches result in discussions around such concerns as relevant evidence and how we could and should establish it. The value of postmodernist thinking lies in its near-pathological opposition to the argument from authority. In another post, I used a quote that's relevant to rejecting arguments from authority and overcoming our own biases:

This is why questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e., science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.

Is postmodernism nonsensical, essentially political, and self-deceptive? I think no, yes, and often. Caricatured postmodernism often is nonsensical; actual postmodernism often is both affected and obfuscating. Postmodernism embraces political grandstanding and doesn't try to shroud itself in the fiction of "staying neutral." Postmodernism can be practiced as banal philosophy, as when Foucault's panopticon is applied to this or that social structure. However, I can only say that just as any idea should not be indicted for being used in a silly, oppressive, or evil way, so too should postmodernism not be charged with the wrongdoing of some practitioners.

Postmodernism focuses its skepticism on claims made in the cultural sphere, rather than in the natural sciences sphere. It has empirical dimensions, actual use of language, as well as speculative and philosophical. I dislike seeing people such as Dawkins, Goldstein, and Pinker dismiss postmodernism out of hand because I think postmodernism can be an ally. I dislike people such as Goldberg using postmodernism as a term like communist or fascist – call someone a "PoMo" and you can instantly grab a whole crowd of intellectual sock-puppets to echo your derision toward the person, no questions asked. This is why level-headed assertions of postmodernism should be made more available in the public arena than they are currently.

Universal Human Morality

Over at The Edge, Marc Hauser presents a brief essay arguing that humanity has a “universal moral code” and that it was largely instilled by evolution.

Hauser and his colleagues have performed many experimental studies of children and Internet surveys of people’s reactions to hypothetical moral situations. He provides a highly compelling case for the role of evolution in how we base our own moral judgments.

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

And, so that people don’t think that he’s a victim of the naturalistic fallacy, Hauser closes the essay with this important bit:

Lest there be any confusion about the claims I am making, I am not saying that our evolved capacity to intuitively judge what is right or wrong is sufficient to live a moral life. It is most definitely not and for two good reasons.

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I’m glad work like this is being done because morality is a source of perpetual exploitation among theocrats. Cooperation requires the development of ethics, and ethics demand interpersonal sensitivity with expected compromise.

Morals are not out in space waiting to be received. Rather, they emerge from societies based on expediency.

Reject Science? At Your Peril....

A religionist made the following insane comment online about my article on biblical falsehood:

If we are going to reject any body of literature because it contains impossible things then we are going to have to reject science.

What a silly statement! I am pleased, however, that the commenter apparently concedes that the Bible contains impossible things.

Nevertheless, science is not - or not only - a body of literature. Science makes observations and hypotheses that can be reviewed, criticized, tested, confirmed, falsified, and modified.

The commenter brings out the old saw that science tells us the universe came from nothing. This line of argument is supposed to show that the claims of science are as strange as anything religion says. I agree with this, at least. From multiverses to apprent fine-tuning to dark matter and black holes, science presents a much weirder view of the universe than religion ever has been able to imagine. But science has something that religion does not: evidence. We don't take stock in the weird claims of science because they are weird or because some cool scientists has said it. We take such claims seriously because we have multiple lines of positive evidence behind them. For example, it is perfectly consistent with known laws of physics for the universe to have come from nothing. To illustrate, here is a video lecture from a researcher whose area of study is this very question of "something from nothing."

Of course with this view of science making wierd claims, the religious show once again that they are unwilling to accept scientific hypotheses for what they are, hypotheses. Rather, they want to transform science into another religion, which means they can either believe in it or not. They are unwilling to discuss the mathematical, physical, logical and philosophical bases of the apparently strange ideas that scientists will sometimes propose.

Yet they so arrogantly declare themselves and their narrow beliefs correct. They reject science (which they clearly avoid studying in an unbiased fashion) even though they rely on it every day. They reject the claims of other religions (do they believe Jesus appeared on the iron? what about the recent report of the Koran being written on a little child's skin?) even though they have no less reason to believe these other claims than they do to believe the claims they actually accept.

They uncritically accept a six-day complete creation, men living for 1000 years, the sun and moon 'stopping,' the sea suddenly parting and then returning to normal, earthquakes on demand, the ability of the dead to return to live, the existence of a realm in another dimension where immortal souls go to spend eternity, the ability of people to heal the sick with magic, the ability of people to levitate, a man-made boat containing all gazillions of kinds of life-forms on earth floating alone in a global flood that mercilessly killed everyone else, and so on.

All of this Bible stuff, they are fine with. That stuff is no problem at all.

Heck, they don't mind that most of humanity and land-based life would have died in the flood. They consider it a virtue that Abraham raised not a peep to have his son saved. They say nothing about Jacob's treachery against his own brother or about God's injustice against Adam and Eve. I suspect it's because deep down they know these are but fairy tales.

Yet, they utterly reject out of hand any observation from history, archaeology, textual analysis or anthropology that points toward the idea that the Bible was written by men, collected by men, interpreted and re-interpreted by men, and codified into a religion by men who quite naturally would have theorized that a god "out there, somewhere" was the author of everything, including their personal and national destines.

So, they reject everything except their own parochial vision of the world. The rest of us reject the Bible because it lies. The rest of us accept that the scientific method is the best tool we have to determine a true picture of our origins and our past. Science is the best way we know to generate explanations of the universe and how it works. Science offers the best methods we have ever devised to predict consequences of natural events and of human actions.

Religion offers nothing but institutionalized and socially funded fantasy. It lies about our past and our origins, it explains nothing about how the universe works, and it allows for no predictions of any useful sort.

If they really want to reject science, I wonder why they don't then go live in a cave with Osama bin Laden and stay there. Otherwise, I suspect they do accept science despite their explicit protests and tactily reject religion, which they adopt only as an egocentric tool for propping up a vain vision of themselves as righteous and special individuals.

In the end, my point is that we have a much stronger case for approaching the Bible as literature than for considering it a reliable source of information on the physical world, on human origins, and on human history. If your strongest counter-argument to my point is "You don't believe in miracles, you jerk," then reason is surely against you.

God in the Mirror

Ever wonder why you and God agree so often?

An interesting new study that combines surveys, psychological manipulation, and brain-scanning finds that "God's will" is usually aligned with "my will." The study, by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, finds that people generally think that God's attitudes on important social issues line up with their own opinions. Shocker!

According to science blogger Ed Yong:

Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality. But Epley's research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says, "Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs."

Yong brilliantly uses the sockpuppet as a metaphor for relying on a deity to guide decisions and judgments. As Epley himself remarks, God usually tells us we're right:

People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.

However, Steven Novella says on Neurologica that almost any time we try to infer what an other (either big "o" or little "o") thinks, we start from our own personal beliefs.

This is why questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.

Why the Bible Is False

The Bible is false because it asserts the occurence of events that could not have occured, events that were – and are – impossible. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells us the title character was visited by the ghost of his father. Do we believe this? Tolkien’s The Hobbit is set in a time between the dawn of fairies and the dominion of men. Do we believe this? The Bible tells us of many things that happened, and for millennia people have believed that these things actually happened.

Creationists and religionists think, incorrectly, that skeptics bear the burden to “disprove” the Bible. In fact, they are the ones who need to come up with more than “the Bible says so” as support for the claims of their belief, particularly claims relating to divinity, miracles and divine inspiration.

Now, I should say unequivocally that I support the right of people to hold whatever beliefs they do. If someone wants to believe religion is true, that’s fine. If someone wants to practice religion, then I say go ahead in peace. But I will not have these beliefs entered into a public arena that I share without counters being offered. So, as is common during post-Thanksgiving in America, if people want to carp about “keep Christ in Christmas,” then I want to mention that the evidence for Jesus is highly flimsy and that Jesus is over-rated anyway.

It’s important to understand truth as best we can. I have no illusions about my own intellectual capabilities and limitations. Understanding truth means trying to consider matters while also recognizing these capabilities and limitations. In the end, all we can do is make questions and formulate hypotheses. For me, the idea of faith has become increasingly repugnant. I view faith as an attempt to seduce the intellect into motionlessness. I can only see faith as the reason for not giving due skepticism to the outrageous claims of the Bible, claims that would be challenged heartily in any other intellectual domain.

In what follows, I will present ten impossible things from the Hebrew Scriptures and ten from the New Testament. None of these things could actually have happened. If someone were to claim that these things happened just today, no one would believe it without more than a book’s say-so. I offer these examples as a representative sample of what makes religion factually and morally wrong, in my opinion.

Religion tells people that these things are true, and religion's collective bodies of interpretation do everything in their power to cover over the bare absurdity of what the Bible says. I have explained before my low opinion of interpretation, so I’ll refer the interested reader to that article. Religion also insists that its texts and its interpretations are superior; indeed, religion falsely and maliciously claims that one cannot be good without belief. This contemptuous insistence places religion in a morally dubious hoop, a zone of totalitarian oversight on free inquiry and expression.

Here, then, are ten impossibilities in the Hebrew Scriptures. I’ll try to keep the commentary to a minimum.

(1) Genesis 1:1 (and following) – The creation story, one of two non-identical accounts. A literal six-day creation and completion of the Earth and/or the universe is impossible.

(2) Genesis 5:5 – Adam lived 930 years. Methuselah (Genesis 5:27) lived 969 years and holds the record. Such life spans for human beings are impossible.

(3) Genesis 7 – The flood. A worldwide flood. WORLD-wide. The entire fucking planet, including animals. That’s just mean. And what are we to make of all the millions of species somehow getting to the ark, living there together, and then dispersing? Sorry, it’s all gotta be BS. Speaking of which, how many tons of manure had to be shoveled off the ark every day?

(4) Genesis 32:25-31 – This is a beautiful and strange passage. Jacob wrestles all night with “a man.” But this man seems to have super-human power. He also re-names Jacob as Israel. Jacob seems to think he has wrestled with God, or an angel, or some other emissary of God. I admit this may not necessarily seem an impossible story, since maybe Jacob wrestled with a talented guy. However, it sure is a mysterious story – in a good way – that to my mind smacks of legend. Despite my sense of the story's factual impossibility, I admire the doggedness in the character Jacob to pursue a blessing.

(5) Genesis 37:5 – This is the first of Joseph’s dreams which prophesy the future. That’s impossible.

(6) Exodus 14:15 (and following) – This is the parting of the sea episode. It’s stirring (no pun intended), but impossible.

(7) Exodus 16:15 (and following) – Manna from heaven. Nope. See also the impossible water from a rock, Exodus 17.

(8) Exodus 17:8 (and following) – This is where Moses’ upraised hands cause Israel to win the military battle, while his lowered hands cause the opposite. It’s impossible.

(9) Numbers 16:31 – God has the Earth open up and swallow some men, their wives, their little children, and their possessions. Everything goes. It’s a terrifying, impossible story.

(10) Joshua 10:12-13. One of the biggies for me: The sun stands still for a whole day. The moon stays too. Im-pos-si-ble, no doubt about it.

Christians seem to hold the tacit impression that even if the Hebrew Scriptures are false, or have some falsity, the truth claims of the New Testament remain unharmed. After all, to them the New Testament supersedes the Hebrew Bible.

I suspect this is one reason that Christianity doesn’t relate the Mount Sinai story as Judaism does. In the Jewish account, God speaks directly to all the people. In the Christian account, Moses mediates between God and the people. The difference here is absolutely essential because the Christian account better prefigures the Jesus model, which is the view Christians want presented. If Christians had to talk about God speaking directly to the Jewish people, some clever fellow might wonder why Christians now need an intercessor.

However, the New Testament is rife with its own impossibilities, to say nothing of its own contradictions and historical inaccuracies. H.L. Mencken characterizes the matter brilliantly in his Treatise on the Gods:

The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with.

And now, here are ten impossibilities in the New Testament. As with the Hebrew Scriptures, I’ll not add much commentary.

(1) Matthew 1:18 – This is the virgin birth, or not quite. Apparently Mary is impregnated not by Joseph her husband but by “The Holy Ghost.” So, we have a double impossibility. Mary becomes pregnant, but no sperm entered her: that’s impossible. The second impossible thing is this “Holy Ghost.”

(2) Matthew 10:1 – Jesus gives his disciples “power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.” It’s the last bit that’s concerning, that these twelve random dudes now get to claim the power to cure sickness and disease. Yeah, right. They didn’t get any magic healing power. That’s impossible.

(3) Mark 16:6 / 16:12-13 – Jesus apparently dies and then reappears alive three days later. Sorry, that’s impossible. Real dead folks don’t come back to life.

(3.5) Matthew 27:50-53 - After Jesus dies, "The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people." However, nobody else seemed to note this rather unusual event and record it for posterity. Since we've already mentioned that real dead people don't come back to life days after having died, let us now mention that it's really really impossible for dead people, even holy people, to return to life because of someone else's death.

(4) Mark 7:32 (and following) – This one is plain gross as well as impossible. Jesus heals a deaf and dumb guy by this weird finger, spitting, tongue touching thing. Sorry, real deaf people can’t be healed by putting fingers in the ear.

(4.5) Luke 1:44 – Fetal John leaping for joy, in the womb. I know babies kick and all, but this one still gets BS points because it’s Mary’s voice that causes John to jump for joy. You get it, right? The whole Jesus-John-save-the-world thing is a carefully crafted, fore-ordained plan. It’s hard to find something that seems more contrived than this story.

(5) Luke 4:5 – There’s an honest-to-goodness devil here showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world.” All of them. Really. The devil. The de-vil. Riiiiiiight.

(6) John 2:9 – This is the water into wine bit. We know, however, that the molecules of water and wine are quite different. Do we believe in magic, in the power to change one substance into another by hoping it will come true? No, sorry, we don’t buy it.

(7) John 6:19 – Jesus walks on water. Levitation, ooooh. But really, we know this is BS. We really do.

(8) John 14:14 – “If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

(9) Acts 16:26 – Earthquake on demand.

(10) 1 Corinthians 15:39 – This is kind of a science one, but the verse basically suggests that all life on Earth is of different flesh. Factually, it’s just wrong. Thus, it’s impossible.

I have much more to say, but I’ll close with a few observations.

One, I have focused exclusively on the things these Bibles say. I’ve simply related text-content. Why should we believe that the universe was created and completed in six regular days? Why should we believe that a man could be born of a virgin? These claims are made plainly and straightforwardly. Given modern knowledge, we might try to resolve the disconnect between text and fact by arguing that the texts are speaking metaphorically. But the literal readings are surely to be preferred because they match with textual precursors from other cultures and the original listeners/readers/authors would not have been privy to our modern knowledge anyway.

Two, I have avoided discussing the really stupid content of the Bibles, such the near-sacrifice of Isaac and Jesus' insistence that families be broken up to follow him. The Bibles - yes, I'm using plural - reek with the fecal scent of ancient tales and outdated petty morals. Much in the Bibles is actually interesting and even wise, but plenty-plenty more is no better than boring garbage that we best remember only to avoid thinking that way.

Three, and this is related to the first point, I have not discussed any of the considerable difficulties to faith presented by archaeology, history, or textual scholarship. These disciplines overwhelmingly support the idea that the Bibles and their religious traditions have decidedly human origins. Mutually reinforcing lines of evidence argue against the god hypothesis and doctrines such as Biblical inerrancy. Indeed, the Bibles are often the best witnesses against a pro-supernatural argument.

Four, I have not discussed any of the teachings and commentaries on the text-content problems. Talmud, kabbalah, Catholic church father writings, and so on: these are all earlier attempts to render sense from the non-sense of the Bibles. Indeed, these interpretations come to supersede the original texts because otherwise we are faced with some really goofy tales and strictures.

In this fourth realm we start to get the dubious claims of unbroken chains back to Sinai, in the case of Talmud, and “divine inspiration” in the case of Church writings. When I talk of religion as a collection of solutions to made-up problems, this is what I mean.

Ten Commandments: What I Want for My Children

My oldest child is six years old, turning seven in a few months. She believes in Santa Claus and in the religious view of the world. She believes that God exists, that Jesus actually returned to life from the dead, and that the stories taught in her Bible are unproblematic. My daughter has a strong mind and a very big heart, and she’s full of passion. One day, she will realize that Santa doesn't fly through the night on Christmas Eve. She’ll figure out all by herself that a lot of what the Bible relates is evil, irrational, and generally irrelevant.

And the Bible is most certainly a text to be questioned seriously. For example, if one accepts the Noah’s Ark story as true, then God killed an awful lot of people and animals. Across the planet, they all died in a most horrific way. If one believes the Jesus story, then God sacrificed himself to himself – rather egocentric and not much of a sacrifice, really. Since just declaring faith that Jesus is God gets people out of "hell" and into "heaven," one wonders why the omniscient deity did not offer the belief option to Noah’s generation.

I have full confidence that one day, all my children will arrive at the conclusion that religion is man-made and that gods are fictional. When we get to this point, I will talk to them about morality and about basic principles for living an upstanding life. Since they will have already heard of the Ten Commandments, I may offer them a list of precepts like the following:

(1) You are a human being, one of many humans past and present. You are connected and yet different from other people. You are connected yet different from other animals on Earth. You are connected yet different from the Earth that is your home. Respect yourself and all that share connection with you.

(2) You are neither inferior nor superior to anyone or anything. Develop your own opinions, values, and ideas. Be willing to share, discuss and even change your mind. But don’t compromise your integrity. Ultimately, the only help is self-help.

(3) Watch your language. In all matters, speak carefully, considerately, and charitably - but especially when speaking about people. Listen vigorously and ask thoughtful questions. Challenge and criticize bad ideas, even when good people hold them.

(4) Care for both your body and your mind. Nourish them, exercise them, and rest them. Avoid agitating them, but don’t avoid a challenge. Follow your passions, but don’t allow them to govern you.

(5) Respect your mother, your father, your elders, and your ancestors because your life includes some of their lives. Respect is not reverence, and it’s not blind devotion. Those who have come before you have lived, struggled, succeeded, failed, loved, lost and journeyed in much the same way as you do now.

(6) Respect all life, your life and other lives. No one has more right to live than anyone or anything else.

(7) Appreciate relationships, especially romantic relationships. Cherish your own relationships and do not disturb others’.

(8) Respect ownership. Take only what has been freely given to you and what you have legitimately purchased. Express gratitude to people; giving and sharing freely is the highest form of expressing gratitude.

(9) Speak up to help people when they are in trouble. Don’t lie about others. Don't permit injustice.

(10) Enjoy your life now and all that you have. Every day is unique and unrepeatable.

This is how I write ten basic principles. I place a premium on respect for people, living things, and relationships. My children may write their principles differently. They may focus on respect differently than I do. They may add more items to the list or subtract some. When the time comes, we'll talk about it. That's the point, ultimately.

And note that I have deliberately avoided the word "commandment." I cannot command my children to believe what I believe how I believe. I should not do so. My children are not Christian, Jewish or Atheist. They will one day and by themselves tell me what they are at that time. I will accept and respect their decisions.

I look forward to talking with my children some day about reality and about happiness. I hope for many conversations about personal character, values, and accomplishment. My children deserve these conversations. They deserve to know that I think they should live fully and wonderfully. They deserve to know that I think they can indeed live so, that all people can.

What I want for my children goes well beyond a holiday or a season. I want them to have a life, a life of many lives. I want them not to have the world but to be an active and positive part of it. And I want them to think of their contribution in terms of the universe, not just the world. Ultimately, I want them to connect themselves to the real universe, not a filtered and fictional one.

Keith Jarrett: Boldly Going

Having been a serious Keith Jarrett fan for about 20 years, I can say unreservedly that Jarrett has been the musical artist of my maturity. I own almost 30 different Keith Jarrett recordings, and I have seen him perform live with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. Jarrett remains a central figure in my listening, even though in recent years, I have branched out to the music of such performers as Marilyn Crispell, Dave Holland, Evan Parker, Irene Schweitzer, Tomasz Stanko, Bobo Stenson, Esbjorn Svensson, Ralph Towner, and John Zorn.

Jarrett’s catalogue is quite diverse. I have several recordings with the American Quartet, which included Charlie Haden, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman. This was a hot group, bridled and bristling with tension. The Survivor’s Suite is, to my mind, their most stunning effort. Jarrett’s European Quartet was perhaps more celebrated. Drummer Jon Christensen and bassist Palle Danielsson are spectacular players, but saxophonist Jan Garbarek was a superstar to rival Jarrett. Garbarek played with an utterly singular combination of tenderness, soul, and intensity. Songs such as “Sunshine Song,” “Blossom,” “Long as You’re Livin’ Yours,” and “The Journey Home” capture this quartet at its stunning best.

Since the 1980s, Jarrett has teamed up with Peacock and DeJohnette in the so-called “Standards Trio.” But the group has made two very good “free” recordings. The group is highly professional, sometimes a bit self-indulgent, but just awesome in their collective powers.

Jarrett’s solo piano recordings have been the main draw for me. The first one I owned contained concerts from Bremen and Lausanne. I had never heard anything like it before, but I connected with it immediately. Here was Jarrett, totally bold, walking onto stage and composing on the spot. He was improvising, but he was composing also. To me, that’s the essential difference between Jarrett and many free players. Jarrett doesn’t just play and let the notes extend off into the stratosphere. He’s at once trying to bring out a form from the notes and to let that form morph into something else. And that's what was so exciting for me, the fact that I was going on this journey too and discovering what was to come. He wrung these lush, rich sounds out of the piano. He music expressed exuberance as well as reverence, and he was a font for endlessly emerging musical ideas.

As a listener, I appreciate the daring and the risk-taking of a performer like Jarrett. I admire Jarrett’s continued willingness to experiment and explore in and through his music. I no longer follow Jarrett single-mindedly like I once did, but I see Jarrett’s music as part of my life for the rest of my life. I think this is because in my impending maturity I still see living life as a kind of improvisation, as a daring expression that must be taken up boldly. As long as I see things this way, Jarrett’s music is relevant, indeed central, to my life.

Against Interpretation

I don’t trust interpretation. I take very little stock in it.

Many years ago, a scholar (and now sometime New York Times columnist) Stanley Fish wrote a fairly famous essay called “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” The essay is terribly interesting because it reveals how great, consistent interpretations can be made without any basis in reality. An interpretation is very much a work of art. It is much less so a legitimate hypothesis about the world.

I’ll try to summarize what I see as the important part of the essay. Fish’s students, who are learning about English religious poetry of the seventeenth century, walk into their classroom and see this on the chalkboard:

Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)

This list had been put on the board for the class preceding the one on religious poetry. It is actually a list of surnames. These are linguists and literary theorists: Roderick Jacobs, Peter Rosenbaum, Samuel Levin, J. P. Thorne, and so on.

Here’s what happens next, according to Fish:

When the members of the second class filed in I told them that what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the kind they had been studying and I asked them to interpret it. Immediately they began to perform in a manner that, for reasons which will become clear, was more or less predictable. The first student to speak pointed out that the poem was probably a hieroglyph, although he was not sure whether it was in the shape of a cross or an altar. This question was set aside as the other students, following his lead, began to concentrate on individual words, interrupting each other with suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed spontaneous. The first line of the poem (the very order of events assumed the already constituted status of the object) received the most attention: Jacobs was explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum. This was seen to be an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an emblem of the immaculate conception. At this point the poem appeared to the students to be operating in the familiar manner of an iconographic riddle. It at once posed the question, "How is it that a man can climb to heaven by means of a rose tree?" and directed the reader to the inevitable answer: by the fruit of that tree, the fruit of Mary's womb, Jesus. Once this interpretation was established it received support from, and conferred significance on, the word "thorne," which could only be an allusion to the crown of thorns, a symbol of the trial suffered by Jesus and of the price he paid to save us all. It was only a short step (really no step at all) from this insight to the recognition of Levin as a double reference, first to the tribe of Levi, of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and second to the unleavened bread carried by the children of Israel on their exodus from Egypt, the place of sin, and in response to the call of Moses, perhaps the most familiar of the old testament types of Christ. The final word of the poem was given at least three complementary readings: it could be "omen," especially since so much of the poem is concerned with foreshadowing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, since it is man’s story as it intersects with the divine plan that is the poem's subject; and it could, of course, be simply "amen," the proper conclusion to a poem celebrating the love and mercy shown by a God who gave his only begotten son so that we may live.

I ask you: how can you trust interpretation after reading this? Anything, anything at all, can be interpreted. And it can be interpreted in ways that are insightful, sensible, and worldview-changing.

These students get an interpretive frame – it’s a religious poem – and then proceed to hook up the text to the frame. I have no doubt that the students could have developed an equally viable interpretation with a different frame.

And this is why I find a religious view of the world hard to take seriously: it’s just a frame, after all. However happy religious adherents claim to be, however beautiful their cities, however tender their friendships, however healthy their children, however skilled their artists, however abundant their harvests, and however kind their weather – the religious view is just a frame. (Forgive me, Ursula K. Le Guin.)

An interpretive frame is not reality, and it need not be reality. Rather, it is a fiction, a scenario, an imposition. Reality and truth are incidental, maybe even accidental, to the frame. Don’t get me wrong, interpretations are great. I love ‘em. But I don’t trust ‘em. They seem to me like the object of caution in Bob Dylan's song: “And don't go mistaking Paradise / For that home across the road.”

Now, some smart person might rightly challenge that I should examine and criticize my own interpretive frames. I go after the religious frame, that person will say, so why not go after the non-religious frame too? This would be a fair question, but let's remember that the religious frame dictates, among other things, the existence of an interventionalist supernatural being that cannot be seen or independently verified. Indeed, only texts and tradition insist that such a being exists or ever has existed. In its positive claims about reality, the religious frame imposes a more restrictive view than an atheist frame.

My atheist frame, too, is an imposition, but one that does not introduce an inscrutable being. It is less restrictive than the religious frame insofar as it does not necessarily rule out a god or gods. In other words, the atheist frame is not necessarily anti-theist whereas the theist frame is automatically anti-atheist. The difference between religious and atheist frames is one of degree rather than kind: the religious frame assumes the existence of things, and their fundamental stability, when it has no justification to do so. The atheist frame makes assumptions and claims about reality, but invites the independent testing and questioning of these assumptions and claims.

Regardless of whether one applies a religious or an atheist frame to some text, interpretation is suspect. The worst interpretations seek to confirm the frame itself, and confirm it from within rather than independently. For instance, they will approach a poem as a religious artifact, and they will produce a reading shows the poem expressing religious ideas. This inside operation - also known as confirmation bias - is the sort of reasoning we need to be cognizant of and that we need to avoid, if our goal is to get closer to reality.

No Historical Jesus?

A modern American person cannot escape Jesus. That name, that imagery and iconography, the followers - Jesus is everywhere. If one is not a Christian, life can feel like a constant argument against a steady barrage of Jesus 'facts' and 'theology.' Just to get some peace from the world, many Jews tend to take the position that "Jesus was a good guy, a Jew like me who had some great ethical teachings."

Unfortunately, many who profess to be Christian know very little about the history of Christian beliefs or about the many serious questions surrounding the historicity of Jesus. They rarely seek to know if any physical and historical evidence actually supports the hypothesis that Jesus existed as a person in the world.

The rarity may seem strange since, presumably, Jesus is the central figure of Christianity. Except that often the centrality of Jesus seems not to be the case. In the beliefs and practices of even major holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, Jesus is not so much a person as the person that stuff happened to. Someone was miraculously born of a virgin (who was herself born of a virgin) in a stable? Oh, it was Jesus. Someone was crucified and later rose from the dead? Oh, it was Jesus.

I've always been struck at the emptiness of Jesus, and I think this emptiness may actually contribute to keeping people in the churches. All the shit happened to Jesus, but he doesn't ask anything of you directly. His emissaries in church ask, but you know them and they're OK. Go to church and celebrate the shit that happened, and then pass the money over to the emissaries.

It's about being together in a community and affirming that shit happens. It's not about Jesus; it's about the shit that happened. It's not about Jesus; it's about Christianity.

And so we come to Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, authors of The Jesus Mysteries, who offer a different view of Jesus and Christianity. As I see it, they hypothesize that modern Christianity is based around one big misunderstanding about Jesus. They say:

The traditional history of Christianity is hopelessly inadequate to the facts. From our research into ancient spirituality it has become obvious that we must fundamentally revise our understanding of Christian origins in the most shocking of ways. Our conclusion, supported by a considerable body of evidence in our book, The Jesus Mysteries, is that Christianity was not a new revelation. It was a continuation of Paganism by another name. The gospel story of Jesus is not the biography of an historical Messiah. It is a Jewish reworking of ancient Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman Osiris-Dionysus, which had been popular for centuries throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

The similarity of the Jesus narrative to pagan myths is well known. In modern times, however, we tend to equate myths with lies. This is not how the ancient world understood myths.

It is hard for us today to imagine the Jesus story being consciously created, but this is because we have misunderstood ancient spirituality. Myths were not seen as untruths as they are now. They were understood as allegories of spiritual initiation, which encoded profound mystical teachings. Reworking old myths to create new ones was a standard practice in the ancient world.

These are serious and high-impact claims being made. It should be noted that neither author is, so far as I know, an academic researcher. But folks such as G.A. Wells, Gerd Lüdemann, and many others have done real work that makes a "Christ-myth" theory not only viable but very likely. After all, according to the myth, a man comes to life after being dead three days. That man then ascends to heaven. It's a nice story, but let's not forget that such an occurrence would go against the way the world actually works. We need to employ the reality principle every now and again.

So, having taken a several grains of salt, we hear more from Freke and Gandy:

The conquests of Alexander the Great had turned the Mediterranean world into one culture with a common language. This created an age of eclecticism, much like our own, in which different spiritual traditions met and synthesized. Jewish mystics of this period, such as Philo Judeas, were obsessed with synthesizing Jewish and Pagan mythology. In light of all this, it is actually no surprise that some group of Jewish mystics should synthesize the great mythic hero of the Jews, Joshua the Messiah, with the great mythic hero of the Pagans, Osiris-Dionysus.

At the time, both Pagans and Christians were well aware that the Jesus story was a myth. The early Christians, known as Gnostics, understood the Jesus story as allegory, not history, and even called Jesus by the names of the Pagan Godman. The Gnostics were brutally eradicated by the Roman Church in the 4th and 5th centuries, and since then we have believed the official propaganda that these Christians were dangerous heretics who had gone Pagan.

Actually the evidence suggests the opposite is closer to the truth. The Gnostics were the original Christians, just as they themselves claimed. They had synthesized Jewish and Pagan mythology to produce the Jesus story and many other extraordinary Christian myths largely unknown today. The Roman Church was a later deviation, which misunderstood the Jesus story as history. It was, as the Gnostics said at the time, an imitation Church teaching a superficial Christianity designed for the masses.

The authors clearly make a target of the Roman Catholic Church's brand of Christianity, as well they should. But I part ways with the authors when they obviously sympathize with the Gnostics:

Roman Christianity, and all its subsequent offshoots, is based on the idea that if you believe in the existence of an historical Jesus you will go to heaven when you die. For the Gnostics, however, Jesus is an everyman figure in an initiation allegory. They taught that if you yourself go through the process of initiation symbolized by the Jesus myth, you would die to your old self and resurrect in a new way. The Greek word we translate as resurrect also means awaken.

For the Gnostics, Christianity was about dying -- the idea of giving up your mortal body and awakening to your immortal essence as the Christ within -- the One Consciousness of the Universe. This mystical enlightenment was not something that happened after death, but could happen here and now.

I am intrigued by the different picture of Jesus that the authors paint, clean-shaven and such:

The historical figure of Jesus has been so central to Western culture that it is hard to question his existence. As soon as we hear his name we can see him in our mind's eye, in his flowing white robes, with long hair and a beard. Yet this picture of Jesus was not created until the 8th century. Early portrayals of Jesus show him clean-shaven with short hair and wearing a Roman tunic. St Paul says that long hair disgraces a man, so presumably his image of Jesus was not the same as ours.

In the next passage, the authors err by going all sensationalist on us - "everything you thought you knew is WRONG!!!" If anything makes me think these folks are snake-oil salesman, this is it. However, their points about the paucity of physical evidence for a historical Jesus are legitimate. I wish more Christians would ponder these ideas a bit more.

The fact is that everything we think we know about Jesus, like this romantic picture of the bearded savior, is a creation of the human imagination. Actually there is barely a shred of evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus and this dissolves on closer inspection. Paul, the earliest Christian source, shows no knowledge of an historical man, only a mystical Christ. The gospels have been thoroughly discredited as eyewitness reports. Other bits of traditional evidence, such as references to Jesus by the Jewish historian Josephus, have been shown to be later forgeries. If solid evidence had existed, there would have been no need to have created such fabrications.

The authors try to close out with a statement that basically they are helping people be even more spiritual. They somehow have the secret to help people be happier and more personally in touch with the divine. This is voodoo mystical shit. It's the same old story: there's something better, somewhere, out there, "beyond" this reality. I don't understand why people repulse themselves from reality.

A little over a century ago most people believed the story of Adam and Eve to be history. To most thinking people today its is obviously a myth. We predict that within a generation a similar revolution will have taken place in our understanding of the gospels. People will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and be amazed that a culture with the technology to travel to the moon could see the fabulous story of Jesus as anything other than a myth. However, we do not want to dismiss the Jesus story as nonsense. For us it is truly the greatest story ever told, because it has been thousands of years in the making. It is a perennial tale that has fascinated the human soul since the dawn of time.

Whilst our ideas clearly rewrite history, we do not see ourselves as undermining Christianity. On the contrary we are suggesting that Christianity is in fact richer than we previously imagined. According to the original Gnostic Christians, the Jesus story is a perennial myth with the power to impart the mystical experience of Gnosis, which can transform each one of us into a Christ, not merely a history of events that happened to someone else two thousand years ago.

So, this is interesting stuff unfortunately packaged in sensationalism. Interested readers will be better served by reading the excellent review by Richard Carrier of Earl Doherty's book, The Jesus Puzzle.

Putting the Watchmaker Analogy to Bed

I have been working for some time on an extended refutation of the Watchmaker Analogy. It's the only argument creationists really make. Everything else is window dressing.

However, before I could finish what would have been a masterpiece of flawless logic and argumentation, The Edge posted excepts from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's forthcoming book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

One of these excerpts treats the Watchmaker Analogy very well, so I will present it here instead of my own piece. However, in case you are a creationist (and therefore lazy and challenged), I will bracket out the specific part that shows the Watchmaker Analogy fails. Here it is, slightly edited to fit context:

The process of replication can give rise to the illusion of design - that is, design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication.

This means that we have an alternative to watchmaker-makes-the-parts-of-a-watch. We know that complicated things with a coherent purpose can in fact - in fact - arise without a designer. But I'm summarizing. For the full story, keep reading.

3. The Argument from Design

A. The Classical Teleological Argument

1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)

2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)

3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.

5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).

7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.

2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."

3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).

4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).

5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.

6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious Argument from Ignorance:

1.There are things that we cannot explain yet.

2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.

2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).

4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).

5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).

6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).

7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.

8. God exists.

FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator

1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.

2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).

3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).

4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.

5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).

6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.

7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).

8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.

10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

Believe me, this is just what I was going to say.

Oh, and I've noticed that over at Uncommon Descent, they're already going ape-shit over Goldstein's book and arguments. For example, they insist that Goldstein's Teleological Argument is not the one they make.

Yes, they are actually trying to argue "That's not MY teleological argument you're talking about," kind of like the old chestnut, "That's not MY religion you are talking about."

One commentator cries:

This analysis doesn’t work because the argument is mis-stated. The first premise is not “anything which exists must have a cause”, but “anything which begins to exist must have a cause”, which makes a huge difference in the analysis. Well known theistic philosopher William Lane Craig states the Kalaam Cosmological Argument this way:
Premise 1 – Anything that begins to exist must have a cause
Premise 2 – The universe began to exist
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.

Another commenter posts this:

This is not the classical teleological argument, I’m not even sure that it’s Paley’s argument (which likewise is not to be confused with the classical teleological argument).

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is a joke, a sad attempt to delay the inevitable.

The notion of "begins to exist" is about as fuzzy an idea as we can get. When did I begin to exist? At precisely what moment? It's like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, where one can proceed infinitely to smaller and smaller levels. Think long and hard, but in the end it's people who decide and define when something "begins to exist." The notion is a man-made construct, a logical convention that nature has no obligation to honor.

Then of course there's the problem of God. When did God begin to exist? How do we know whether he did or didn't begin to exist? If the universe had a cause, did that cause have to be supernatural? Could it have been caused by, say, another universe? Could the laws of physics have allowed it to be caused, such as we were told by physicist Lawrence Krauss?

I've mentioned it before. Logic is great stuff except when it doesn't work or when messy reality gets in the way.

Goldstein has solid philosophical credentials (much better than those who criticize her) and is under no obligation to respond every time a creationist wants to try moving argumentative goalposts. In the end, the Kalam Cosmological Argument falls in just the same way as the other variations of the Teleological Argument.

Good night, watch. Good night, watchmaker.

Adolf the Creationist

I'm happy to put to bed the awful lie that creationists love. "Hitler and Darwin, they say. "Darwin led to Hitler. SQUAWK!!"

Ed Brayton shows us how Hitler used creationist ideas and lots o'GAWD to make his assertions.

While we're at it, Brayton also comments on why the "survival of the fittest" line of Social Darwinism is so stupid next to what the theory of evolution actually is and does.

We Are All Connected

I wish I'd watched more Cosmos when I was a kid.



"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it. But the way those atoms are put together."

How Everything Came from Nothing, No God Necessary

Reality is better than man-made fairy tales, as physicist Lawrence Krauss explains in this wonderful lecture.

The big point that comes out from this is a devastating answer to the common theistic sneer, "Do you believe that everything came from nothing?" Well, yes, I think the cosmologists are onto something just like this. Here, view this video and pay attention starting especially at 33:00. The laws of physics allow a universe to begin from nothing, no deity needed.



Favorite quote: "The universe is the way the universe is, whether we like it or not."

We Ain't Yer Other!

I stated before that not only do we not need God to be good, but that we also already don't use or need God in our everyday goodness. Practically speaking, I said, we are all atheists.

Of course, this fact drives many theists bat-shit insane. And what do theists do when they cannot face facts? Why, they hope to confuse the issue by resorting to tangents while also fleeing the original issue with giant leaps of logic.

Take the "Jewish Philosopher," for example, who is pretty much the worst example on the Web of both a Jew and a Philosopher. He rants:

According to atheism, there are no consequences to our actions other than the obvious material ones. Therefore if I believe that I am smart enough or lucky enough to get away with crime, I’ll do it.

According to atheism human life has no value. We are merely miniscule bags of chemicals stuck to the surface of an insignificant planet.

According to atheism, we have no personal responsibility for anything which we do. If we murder, this is merely the result of brain chemistry and bad influences, but not any bad choice because free will does not exist.

The quote above is saturated with the worst kind of stupidity, the kind that takes a reasonable premise and then saddles it with all sorts of scary-sounding, insidious implications. When the so-called philosopher says, for example, "According to atheism, there are no consequences to our actions other than the obvious material ones," he makes what I would consider a basically true statement - if it means that there is no divine retribution for human actions. But then he screws up the logic by going straight from the premise to a silly conclusion: "Therefore if I believe that I am smart enough or lucky enough to get away with crime, I’ll do it."

Uh, wait. The so-called philosopher ignores that there are indeed consequences to crime other than divine retribution. Remember all those "obvious material" consequences he mentioned so vaguely just before? Well, they include jail, fining, feeling guilty, hurting someone else's feelings, family shame, and so on - none of which requires a god.

On the other hand, many people commit crime (or crime's avatars, intolerence and chauvinism) because of holy inspiration. They shoot people in a place of worship or fly planes into buildings, or embezzle, or commit espionage in the name of their god - all this because they believe they will receive a divine reward in the afterlife!

We don't have to parse the entire rant of stupidity that is the (ahem) jewish philosopher's comment to realize that like many theists who have a stick in their ass about atheism, he doesn't really know or understand atheism at all.

Every time such people try to insist about what atheists believe and what atheism entails, they err in a serious way by adopting non-sequiturs and conclusions that don't follow from premises.

Let's look at some more of the Jewish Philosopher's wisdom:

If we do find atheists living peaceful, honest, sober lives (which as far as I know is actually rare) this is the result of the influence of parents and grandparents who were not atheists. It is in spite of their atheism.

Atheists may claim that they are good because invariably crime does not pay in the long run (which is not necessarily true – look at Stalin and Mao who died peacefully in bed) or because humans are instinctively good (which is nonsense – read a history book or a newspaper).

Here we have a reverse "No True Scotsman" fallacy, in that the claim is that a good atheist is not a real atheist. What we see here is the Jewish Philosopher trying to retain an unreasoned assumption. Then he resorts to a ridiculous straw man argument in "invariably crime does not pay in the long run." Notice how the oh-so-honest Jewish Philosopher has sought to dilute the stronger argument given by P.Z. Myers:

There is morality in my 'worldview'; don't confuse the fact that I state baldly that there is no external non-human intelligent agent that imposes morality on me with an absence of moral thought. I derive my sense of what is right and wrong from intrinsic properties such as empathy and other social impulses, and from acculturation in a stable, successful society that has expectations of parents to introduce their children to what constitutes reasonable behavior. I also derive it rationally from what I can see as a robust strategy for long term security and happiness within my culture — that is, robbing banks has a very poor long term return on the effort.

Myers gives an argument that is personal and situational. It's a strong argument because it is concrete and specific. The Jewish Philosopher attempts to abstract the argument into a vague sound-bite.

Why do theists like the Jewish Philosopher do this? My hypothesis is that they see atheism as a kind of anti-religion, an Other to use as a receptacle for all the bad things that would otherwise undermine their sense of how great their religion is. That is, they are never far from the thought that none of their core superstitions are actually true, so they intellectually build an Other to serve as the scene for this thinking.

Because they see atheism as an Other, these anti-atheists can rarely understand it in anything but negative and hostile terms. They take a fundamental position toward atheism that is is narcissistic. The believe that it's all about their little religion (cue Bill Donohue) when really their specific combination of fairy tales, lies, and restraints matter very little.

Children and Fatherhood

I should write more often about how much I enjoy my children and how much I love being a father. It really is a fantastic thing to live with the kids and to be part of their growing up (with their mother, my wife, of course!!). But even more, I like that we're connected and I like our connection. Ugh, I'm failing with the words. Maybe that's why I hardly write about the kids - they are so wonderful that I cannot express it coherently.

Hannah is so very smart and sweet. She's also pretty and full of life. I hardly worry about her because I know that she'll succeed in whatever she chooses to do. I think we really get each other.

Emily is such a cutie, and I can tell that she's quite intelligent. She and I share a tendency to be quiet and to be homebodies. I can't wait to see her in school, but another part of me thinks she's perfect as-is and doesn't want her to grow up.

C.J. is a happy, bouncy, boisterous little guy. He's all boy, as the mothers on our street like to say. Gosh is he loud and energetic. He's really a physical kid and very independent. But he has the face of an angel. I'm not quite sure what our relationship will be like. He's so attached to his mother - and I don't blame him - but I wonder sometimes if he sees me as a rival in the house, as if he's already pushing to be the alpha male!

The kids make me laugh - a lot. Although I very much like living in the present, I get volumes of joy from a vague vision of the future, in which my three grown children are all around visitng and laughing with me. Much as my wife has shown me what happiness is, the children have taught me about joy.

Morality: No God Necessary

Anti-atheist folk love to suggest that atheists have no basis for morality. It's a tired, malicious and incorrect argument that claims: If you don't believe in God then you have no objective standard for morality. You make morality a mere matter of opinion or preference. If you want to kill someone because you consider her or him your inferior, there is no moral standard that would lead you to the conclusion that you should not kill.

The anti-atheist argument on morality usually gets formulated as I have expressed above, with little deviation. For example, we get this from Dennis Prager:

Though most college-educated Westerners never hear the case for the need for God-based morality because of the secular outlook that pervades modern education and the media, the case is both clear and compelling: If there is no transcendent source of morality (morality is the word I use for the standard of good and evil), "good" and "evil" are subjective opinions, not objective realities.

In other words, if there is no God who says, "Do not murder" ("Do not kill" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew which, like English, has two words for homicide), murder is not wrong. Many people may think it is wrong, but that is their opinion, not objective moral fact. There are no moral "facts" if there is no God; there are only moral opinions.

And someone at Uncommon Descent recently produced this gem:

[H]ere’s a simple thought experiment for any of the materialists (or philosophical naturalists, or atheists) among our number here at Uncommon Descent. Perhaps this simple thought experiment can bring some clarity to moral questions from a materialist persepctive.

Here goes: You’re in a large city and walk up to a a busy street corner. Heavy traffic is whizzing by in both directions on the street you need to cross. As you prepare to cross, you notice next to you a smallish, frail, elderly woman, carrying some shopping bags, who also needs to cross the street, but is quite obviously nervous and frightened of the attempt. You now have 3 options: 1) you can ignore her completely and just go about your business; 2)you can push her into the traffic; 3) you can assist her to get safely across the street. The moral question is, what is the right thing to do and why is it the right thing to do (that is to say, how can we know that is the right thing to do)?

If you read the comments in the thread from which this quote comes, you'll see that the main thing the person wants to know is "how we can know" what is "in fact the right thing to do."

A few elements stand out to me in this reasoning.
(1) The 'how can we know' part is rather pathetic, as if we need to have worked out our philosophies of right and wrong behavior before we can make any decisions at all. Yet we very often act upon decisions without knowing whether they are right or fully right. Indeed, too often several options have varying degrees of rightness. The 'how can we know' meme is a dodge, an unnecessary rabbit trail that could be pushed out endlessly - well, how can we know that we know?

(2) It is baldly ridiculous to imply that a written law, whether it be a holy book or national legal code, imparts knowledge of what the right thing to do is. Statutes tells us what to do or not to do. They indicate moral thinking, but they don't define or contain it. Just imagine for a moment what the world would be like if Iranian law were equivalent to morality, or Russian law, or Mormon law. But in the end, we cannot know what is the right thing to do from a holy book or from a sense of having a divine judge watching over our thoughts and deeds. To know implies a level of certainty that we rarely can achieve when it comes to morality.

(3) It's even more ridiculous to posit that virtually any moral choice one might make in a given situation is "in fact" the right thing to do. What's a fact is that people can always devise choices. Moral decisions are about reasoning and strategy, not illusory facts.

Theists have a hard time grasping that appealing to God is not the same as appealing to an objective standard of morality. The appeal is always subjective. The timeless, unchanging morality of God depends on whether one is a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian or a whatever. It depends on when in history you live. It depends on your personal sense of values, perhaps shared with the larger culture in which you live. It hardly takes any thought at all to realize that as a practical matter, objective morality is meaningless. It's purely a rhetorical term.

Atheist hero P.Z. Myers has a thoughtful, devastating response to the charge that we cannot be good without God. He says:

There is morality in my 'worldview'; don't confuse the fact that I state baldly that there is no external non-human intelligent agent that imposes morality on me with an absence of moral thought. I derive my sense of what is right and wrong from intrinsic properties such as empathy and other social impulses, and from acculturation in a stable, successful society that has expectations of parents to introduce their children to what constitutes reasonable behavior. I also derive it rationally from what I can see as a robust strategy for long term security and happiness within my culture — that is, robbing banks has a very poor long term return on the effort.

So, I do believe in right and wrong. It's just not handed down from a magical sky-lawyer.

Myers says so succinctly and eloquently what I am trying to offer as my main point: Theistic belief in right and wrong is no better than atheist belief in right and wrong. Furthermore, I am skeptical that idea of God itself plays any role in the everyday goodness most people show. Not only do we not need God to be good, but we also already don't use God in our quotidian moral reasoning and judgments.

Practically speaking, we are all atheists.

Bob Dylan: Last Man Standing

As part of my project to create a "greatest hits" CD for my fortieth birthday, I listened to a few of my CDs by Bob Dylan. The most recent one I have is Time Out of Mind. I don't know that I'd call this a great CD, but it has some truly great songs. And Dylan continues even now to produce excellent material.

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan were the great musical forces of my adolescence and early adulthood. They were huge influences and joys in my life. But I rarely listen to the Beatles now, and I don't respond to their songs anymore the way I used to. I still like vintage Stones, but they too are a relic in that they no longer produce new music that excites me.

Dylan, however, remains a "living" artist to me. He still has lessons to tell and stories to teach. Even his old stuff yields rewards. An under-appreciated gem like "Bob Dylan's Dream," from 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, retains a rawness that continues to speak to me. So Dylan is the last man standing, the one artist of my youth who still has relevance.

My first Dylan record was Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. I had high expectations because in my reading everyone seemed to talk so admirably of him. Most of my books were about the Beatles, and they clearly saw Dylan as a great songwriter and a dominant intellect. So when I put on the record and heard the first track, "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35," I thought it was a joke. That voice of Dylan's: was that his real voice? That raw, acoustic sound which was so ragged and poor compared to the studio polish of the Beatles: was this the stuff that drew everyone's admiration?

I went through the other cuts that first time, from "Blowin' in the Wind" to "Like a Rolling Stone." I don't think I liked it all very much, but I didn't dislike it. Some of the songs had neat hooks, like "Just Like a Woman" and "It Ain't Me, Babe." So I continued to listen and to be intrigued by that voice, that unpretty voice. That ever-biting, surprisingly malleable, and ultimately perfect voice.

At 16, I was an unabashed Dylan fan when no one else in my peer group was. I took some grief for this but I didn't care. I knew Dylan was saying things that were better than Rush, R.E.M, Van Halen, and even U2. Here, for example, is the opening to the Prufrock-ian "Ballad of a Thin Man":

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don't understand
Just what you'll say
When you get home.

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Dylan could be positively Shakespearean in his wordplay, as in "Highway 61 Revisited":

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren't right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you're right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61.

Like no one else, Dylan put conversation and drama in songs. In "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," the dialogue stacks questions and misunderstandings and establishes a vision of the mythic American west as a place of desolation and self-inflicted violence:

Well, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,
They were the best of friends.
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day,
Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a footstool
Just above the plotted plain,
Sayin', "Take your pick, Frankie Boy,
My loss will be your gain."

Well, Frankie Lee, he sat right down
And put his fingers to his chin,
But with the cold eyes of Judas on him,
His head began to spin.
"Would ya please not stare at me like that," he said,
"It's just my foolish pride,
But sometimes a man must be alone
And this is no place to hide."

Well, Judas, he just winked and said,
"All right, I'll leave you here,
But you'd better hurry up and choose
Which of those bills you want,
Before they all disappear."
"I'm gonna start my pickin' right now,
Just tell me where you'll be."

Judas pointed down the road
And said, "Eternity!"
"Eternity?" said Frankie Lee,
With a voice as cold as ice.
"That's right," said Judas Priest, "Eternity,
Though you might call it 'Paradise.'"

"I don't call it anything,"
Said Frankie Lee with a smile.
"All right," said Judas Priest,
"I'll see you after a while."

Well, Frankie Lee, he sat back down,
Feelin' low and mean,
When just then a passing stranger
Burst upon the scene,
Saying, "Are you Frankie Lee, the gambler,
Whose father is deceased?
Well, if you are,
There's a fellow callin' you down the road
And they say his name is Priest."

"Oh, yes, he is my friend,"
Said Frankie Lee in fright,
"I do recall him very well,
In fact, he just left my sight."
"Yes, that's the one," said the stranger,
As quiet as a mouse,
"Well, my message is, he's down the road,
Stranded in a house."

Well, Frankie Lee, he panicked,
He dropped ev'rything and ran
Until he came up to the spot
Where Judas Priest did stand.
"What kind of house is this," he said,
"Where I have come to roam?"
"It's not a house," said Judas Priest,
"It's not a house . . . it's a home."

Well, Frankie Lee, he trembled,
He soon lost all control
Over ev'rything which he had made
While the mission bells did toll.
He just stood there staring
At that big house as bright as any sun,
With four and twenty windows
And a woman's face in ev'ry one.

Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful, bounding leap,
And, foaming at the mouth,
He began to make his midnight creep.
For sixteen nights and days he raved,
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest,
Which is where he died of thirst.

No one tried to say a thing
When they took him out in jest,
Except, of course, the little neighbor boy
Who carried him to rest.
And he just walked along, alone,
With his guilt so well concealed,
And muttered underneath his breath,
"Nothing is revealed."

Well, the moral of the story,
The moral of this song,
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong.
So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin',
Help him with his load,
And don't go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road.

Dylan would revisit this spare (if not bleak) vision again, notably in "The Man with the Long Black Coat" from the Oh Mercy album--except perhaps by now he'd lost some optimism:

Preacher was a talkin' there's a sermon he gave,
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied.
It ain't easy to swallow, it sticks in the throat,
She gave her heart to the man
In the long black coat.

There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way.
But people don't live or die, people just float.
She went with the man
In the long black coat.

Dylan is a modern Jeremiah. He sees how out of joint the world is and tells all of us about it. He senses the strangeness of his position as an icon. Everyone praises the prophet's words instead of heeding them. Today's Dylan just sings and doesn't take his "star" status seriously. All he can do is work his work, as he muses in "Tryin' to Get to Heaven," with its allusion to "Midnight Rambler" by the Rolling Stones:

Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I'll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
Some trains don't pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers, like they did before
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

Dylan is that performer who will go until he dies. He's a rail rider with a guitar on his back and a harmonica in his pocket. He's a scop, a troubadour, a vaudevillian. And Dylan is the most important songwriter of them all. One can get older with his songs and within their world of outlaws, strangers, and jilted lovers.

Perhaps Dylan's "suffering servant" posture ultimately wins out over the unapologetic, unrepentant rebelliousness of the Stones. If one lives, one becomes put upon and beaten back. The observing voice in Dylan is undefeated and undaunted, yet unpretentious. That voice does not refuse to warn of the storms approaching in the distance, even if no one heeds the warning.