Author Archives: jbernal

The Scientific Method (“Talking” chimps: Controlling the variables)

Charles Rulon

Where humans, in general, fail in their ability to think critically is in the area of con­trols.  Endless cause and ef­fect errors and wrong conclusions have resulted because of our failure to con­sider the many variables in a situ­a­tion. 

Recently articles have appeared of orangutans using iPads at zoos (Google “Apps for Apes” and “orangutan outreach”).  Apparently, zookeepers are planning to “set up play-dates when the apes can use iPads to video chat with friends in other zoos”.

So, consider the question: Can the great apes actually learn to talk with us—to have a two-way communication—via an iPad or, perhaps, American Sign Language (ASL)?  If they can, that would be absolutely extra­or­dinary.  Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinarily careful research.[i]  And, of course, “talk” has many mean­ings: dogs “talk” when they bark, growl, whimper and leave a message on a fire hydrant.

So let’s go back to the 1970s when research­ers at the University of Nevada reported success in teaching ASL to an infant chim­panzee named Washoe.  For the first time in history it was pro­claimed that a non-human pri­mate, a chimp (our closest evolutionary rela­tive), had mas­tered a lan­guage in which it could actu­ally communicate with humans.  Washoe was reported to not only understand over a hundred different ASL sign gestures, but also to be able to also com­bine them in ways that suggested elementary grammar.  For exam­ple, when a swan flew by, Washoe is reported to have signed the words “water” and “bird.”

Other research­ers soon began teaching ASL and other sign lan­guages to young chimps and even a gorilla with seeming success.  Books, articles and even a film documentary soon appeared.[ii]   Writer Michael Crichton even had a fictional gorilla named Amy extensively communicate with her keeper using ASL in his 1980 novel Congo, a novel I just finished reading.

However from the begin­ning a num­ber of experts on language and an­imal behavior had remained skeptical of these extra­ordinary claims.  But their criticisms regarding the many uncontrolled variables appeared only in tech­ni­cal journals.  Then in 1979-1980 two books (Nim, 1779; Speaking of Apes, 1980) were published.  Both au­thors presented a strong scientific case for the view that, although chimps have a re­mark­able memory that en­abled them to master over a hun­dred different visual signs (dogs and horses can also master several dozen signs), they do not com­pre­hend sign sequences in any way essentially different from a dog’s under­standing of such com­mands as “Go get the newspaper.” These chimps have simply learned to do “clever tricks” for a reward.  The authors documented, by extensively studying unedited video tapes, that:

a. Much of the signing by the trained chimps imitated parts of what the trainer had just signed.  In many cases trainers were astonished to see how often they had unconsciously started a sign that the chimp had noticed and copied.  For example, an un­cut version of a Nova documentary called, “The First Signs of Washoe,” showed that almost all of Was­hoe’s multi­-sign statements came after similar signs by trainers.

b. Most of the chimp’s signing were random combi­na­tions of signs plus the sign for “me” and for the chimp’s name—signs that fit al­most all other signs and which they had learned were likely to be rewarded.

c. The trained chimps never learned the two-way nature of conversation as young children do. They con­tinuously interrupted. The research­ers had ex­plained this away by attri­buting such inter­ruptions merely to the chimps’ “eagerness to talk.”

d. Many times the chimps’ signs were wrong, vague, or only partially complete, resulting in the train­er either “reading in the rest,” or claiming that the chimp was either “making a joke”, “teasing”, or “being bratty.”

e. In the course of several years, these chimps put together signs in thousands of random ways.  No re­searchers bothered to record all of the nonsense com­binations produced by these chimps, such as “Banana eat Nim.”  But every lucky hit such as “Nim eat banana,” was reinforced by cues of approval and went into the re­searcher’s records.   So, claim the skep­tics, these chimps just ran on with their hands until they got what they wanted.

f. Most damaging, deaf native users of ASL not only reported a failure in two-way communication with the trained apes, but also that these apes were not signing ASL at all, but were just making many gestures and partial signs.  In retrospect, it seems obvious that a precondition for any experimental attempt to teach a true sign language to primates would beto ensure that the main contact people are all native speakers of that sign language.  Otherwise it’s somewhat like a non-Italian-speaking trainer with an Italian dictionary trying to raise a human child who hasn’t yet learned a language to speak Italian.

The final conclusion was that when all the above variables were tightly con­trolled, the ability of chimps to have a two-way con­ver­sation with a human dropped almost to chance.

How could re­search­­ers have over­looked all of these seemingly ob­vious vari­ables?

A.  The “successful” chimp trainers had min­imal, if any, training in con­trolling their uncon­scious fa­cial move­ments, breathing rhythms, bodily ten­sions and so on that could cue the apes.  The litera­ture is full of “learn­ed” dogs, horses, pigs, even ducks, that respond to the smallest unconscious cueing.  “Talking” apes don’t perform well at all for skeptical strangers.

B.  Psychologists refer to “confirmation bias” and “ex­peri­­menter ef­fect” for all of the insidious ways that re­search­ers’ con­vict­ions can unwit­tingly deceive them and dis­tort the data.  The past few decades of research in cognitive, social and clinical psychology suggest that such biases may be far more common than most of us realize. Even the best and brightest scientists can be swayed by them, especially when they are deeply invested in their own hypotheses and the data are ambiguous.[iii]   Consider:

a. Eminent scientists tend to be more arrogant and confident than other scientists. As a consequence, they may be especially vulnerable to confirmation bias and to wrong-headed conclusions, unless they are perpetually vigilant.

b. Researchers have a tendency to look for and perceive evidence consistent with their hypotheses and to deny, dismiss or distort evidence that is not.

c. Researchers who get positive re­sults often have their careers advance faster and their work more likely funded. The pressure on scholars to disregard or selectively reinterpret negative results that could doom their careers is considerable.

d. Assistants are strongly moti­vated to produce results that will please an employer who pays their salaries.

e. If the work is controversial, there is a ten­dency for research teams to close off from the outside world and to form a cluster of insid­ers deeply suspi­cious of outsiders.

This brief coverage of “talking” chimps:

a. Was presented to emphasize how cri­tically important (and often how difficult) it is to control all the variables in scientific experiments.  One major variable is human fallibility.  Thus the necessity of having independent impartial investi­ga­tors reproduce the work.

b. Was presented to il­lustrate the power of the human mind to deceive itself.  Such self-deception is particularly wide-spread in areas deal­ing with the paranormal, the supernatu­ral, UFO’s and so-called alternative medicine “cures”.

c. Was not presented to demean the brains of apes and other mammals.  The great apes are probably much smarter than we give them credit for.  Each mammal species has a unique set of evolved mental capabili­ties that we are just on the frontiers of un­der­standing.  We “civilized” humans, for the most part, have seen our­selves as superior to other animals, an atti­tude that has resul­ted in wholesale indifference, care­less­ness and wide­spread species extinction.

d. Was not presented to indicate the last word.  Much research will con­tinue.  Scientific knowledge grows through an openness to correct past er­rors.

Update

Since the 1970s, much research has continued into great ape language, involving chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.  In recent years, computer keyboards and iPads have been added to ASL. A quick Google search reveals that many researchers remain convinced that two-way communication has been achieved.  Their conclusions, however, continue to be disputed.[iv]  So far, at least as reported by the linguistics department at UCLA, no breakthroughs have been confirmed; no unequivocal evidence exists that apes can learn and use a sign language, which incorporates most of the significant features of human language.[v]

Finally, to quote eSkeptic: “Next time you see [a talking chimp] on a television documentary, turn down the sound so you can just watch what he is doing without interpretation from the ape’s trainers.  See if that really appears to be language. Somewhere in the history of our kind there must have been the first beings who could rearrange tokens to create new meanings, to distinguish Me Banana from Banana Me. But the evidence from many years of training apes to press buttons or sign in ASL is that this must have happened sometime after we split off from chimps, bonobos and gorillas.  Since then we have been talking to ourselves.”[vi]

Charles Rulon is an emeritus in the biology department at Long Beach City College.


[i]This article draws heavily from Martin Gardner’s ex­cellent book, Science-Good, Bad and Bogus (1981).

Also see  http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~swinters/371/nimchimpsky.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NimChimpsky

[ii] Omni, Jan., 1980; Nat. Geogra­phic, Oct. 1978; Koko, A Talking Gorilla (film-1979).

[iii] Scott O. Lilienfeld -Scientific American, Nov. 2010, p. 18.

[vi] http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-10-31/#feature

The Scientific Method (Controlling the Variables)

Charles Rulon

 Where people in general fail in their ability to think critically or scientifically is in the area of con­trols.  Endless cause and ef­fect errors and wrong con­clusions have resulted because of our failure to con­sider the many variables in a situa­tion.  Testimonials, anecdotes and biased data gathering make up the evidential back­­bone of pseu­do­sci­ence, paranor­mal be­liefs, religions and quack­ery.  But testi­monials and anecdotes do not a science make.

Con­sider the following example:

“I’m convinced that vegetarians live longer.  Many articles on the web agree with me and as proof both my mother and father were vegetarians and they lived into their 90’s.  My friend, however, suggested that maybe my parents had good genes, and/or were very lucky, and/or had excellent health habits.  Or maybe they did eat meat and lied.  She even hinted that maybe I was exagger­ating to win the argument. Picky! Picky!”

It is the failure of the public to both understand the rigor of the Scientific Method and to appreciate its power to discover empirical truths that has enabled creationism to be promoted over evolution.  It has enabled “alternative medicine” charlatans to thrive, global warming deniers to pollute the media, and politicians to ignore its findings in shaping public policy.

Controls & subliminal learn­ing

The belief in the effectiveness of subliminal mes­sages and advertising used to be widespread.  Some people believed they had become so good (or paranoid) at dis­cov­ering subliminal messages that they saw such messages in every­thing from soap commercials to ancient works of art.  Audiocassettes claiming to have sub­liminal mes­sages that would pro­duce every­thing from quick weight loss to peace of mind were hauling in $50 million annually.  Testimonials of satisfied customers abounded.  True believ­ers were everywhere.  But did these tapes really work?  After all, if sublimi­nal advertising really did work, wouldn’t there be numerous profes­sional text­books, conferences and work­­shops telling the pros how it’s best done?  But there weren’t.  When the vari­ables were tightly controlled, subliminal mes­sages didn’t work.

Consider one actual exper­iment: At the Uni­versity of Wash­ing­ton 237 students listened to com­mer­cially available sub­limi­­nal tapes aimed at im­proving one’s mem­ory or self-es­teem.  The messages were hidden behind sounds of ocean waves.  Each vol­unteer com­­pleted a series of both memory and self-esteem tests before and after using either a memory tape or a self-es­teem tape for one month.

But unknown to the volunteers, the re­searchers had reversed the labels on half the tapes.  So, 1/4th thought they got the memory tape and did get the mem­ory tape; 1/4th thought they got the memory tape, but instead got the self-esteem tape; 1/4th thought they got the self-esteem tape and did get it; 1/4th thought they got the self-esteem tape, but in­stead got the memory tape.

At the end of one month these four groups were all tested again.  Results: No group actually showed any more improve­ment in self-esteem or in memory than any other group.  Yet, of interest, those who thought they had the mem­ory tape were still convinced that their memories had improved and those who thought they were listen­ing to a self-esteem tape (whether they were or not) remained con­vinced that their self-esteem had improved. (It would seem that we could all benefit from a course in the psy­chology of self-deception.)

After dozens of such experiments, the Nation­al Acade­my of Sciences concluded over 20 years ago (1991) that there was neither a theoreti­cal founda­tion nor experi­mental evidence to sup­port claims that subliminal self-help tapes enhanced performance.[i]

Controls: marijuana and auto accidents

Consider the following quote:  “Persons arrested for use of marijuana have, on the av­erage, 40% more auto accidents and 180% more traffic vio­lations than do average drivers of the same age and sex.  It’s obvi­ous, there­fore, that marijuana ad­versely affects driving.”  Yet, are all these accidents and violations really due to the effects of marijuana, itself? Several variables need to be controlled if we wish a scientific answer.  First, is the quote accurate?  Second, maybe the same type of per­son who is willing to break the law to smoke mari­juana also has less respect for our traffic laws in general.  Third, maybe people high on marijuana are also more like­ly to be on other drugs which also decrease their driving ability.  Fourth, maybe the paranoia and fear of being arrested on a drug charge con­tributes to careless driving.

Controls: the plague, God & christening

In Games, God and Gamb­ling (1962), the author asserts that one purpose of keeping vital statistics several centuries ago was to understand the intentions of God.  For example, the bubonic plague in the 1600s was recorded to be much more serious in those years when fewer children were christened.  As a result, it was preached that the plague was God’s punishment for par­ents who didn’t christen their chil­dren.  But assuming this data is even reliable, perhaps fewer children were christened during the plague years simply because more terrified parents fled to the hills with their children before they could be christened.

Controls: vitamin–C and colds

In one experiment 300 university students were given vitamin-C all winter.  They had 65% fewer colds than the winter before.  But, in addition, another randomly selected group of 300 students at the same college were each given what they thought was vitamin-C but, instead, was a placebo.  Also, to make the experiment double-blinded, the dispenser of the real and the fake vitamin-C didn’t know which was which.  Results: The placebo group also had about 65% fewer colds.  Conclusion: in this experiment vitamin-C wasn’t directly responsible for the decrease in colds.

Controls: Join the navy, it’s safer

During World War II a poster read: “During wartime, for every 1000 people in the navy, fewer will die than for every 1000 people in New York City.  Join the navy.  It’s safer!”   Q.  What major variable was not con­sidered?

Ans.  The average phy­sical characteristics of people selected for the navy (young, healthy) are markedly different from those who re­mained behind in New York City.

Controls: the Fremont Christian Clinic

The former Fremont Christian Clinic in Los Angeles would take an X-ray of any person who came in complaining of indigestion or constipation.  The X-ray would show “a colon cancer which was still curable.”  A barrage of expensive pills would follow for many months.  Finally, a second X-ray would be taken.  The can­cer was gone!  A miraculous cure!  Grateful patients were only too happy to write glowing testi­monials, or even to appear in court on behalf of the clinic.  Q.  What major variable was not con­trolled?  Ans: The X-rays were phony.  How many of us can recognize our own X-ray?

Controls: sexually abused children

When children who claimed to have been sexually abused were given anatomically correct dolls (having a rectum and a penis or vagina) to play with, they tended to con­centrate on the genitals and would even stick things up the vagina and rectum.  Such behavior was used as a test to determine if a child really had been molested, or was just making it up.  Q.  What control was missing for this to be a scientific test?  Ans. If children who were not sexually abused were also given anatomically correct dolls, they would behave in the same way toward the dolls as did the molested children.

To summarize

In general, where people fail in their ability to think critically or scientifically is in their under-appreciation of the importance of controls.  Whether we’re talking about subliminal learning, vitamin-C or whatever, tightly controlling all the variables is what separates science from non-science.  This is one of the first things scientists must learn.  Endless cause and ef­fect errors and wrong con­clu­sions have resulted from failure to control all the variables.  Until people become aware of the critical neces­sity for rigorous con­trols, they will remain essentially un­sci­en­tific, no matter how many scien­tific facts they may have memorized.  They will remain like the rooster who crows, notices a moment later that the sun rises and then con­cludes that it’s because of his crowing.

Charles L. Rulon is an emeritus in the Life Sciences department at Long Beach City College

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[i]In the Mind’s Eye, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences (National Academy Press, Washington, 1991, p. 15-16).

Life: “It’s scientifically too improbable; therefore God must have done it”

By Charles Rulon

Improbability arguments re: design in nature

Creationist: “Look, if I found a watch on the beach I would obviously know that all of its parts didn’t fly together by accident.  I would know that there had to have been a watchmaker.  Well, the human eye is much more complex than a watch.  So is a beautifully camouflaged butterfly, plus millions of other species. All of this design obviously proves the existence of an unbelievably intelligent and enormously powerful designer.” 

Response:  It sure looked that way….until 1859.  Then came along Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  Over the years that followed, scientists increasingly demonstrated that God was no longer required as an explanatory factor for all of the design in nature.  Instead, life on Earth turned out to be a four billion year old story of random genetic errors followed by an automatic, blind selection of the more fit and extermi­nation of the less fit.  With this natu­ral selection pro­cess, all the so-called “design” in nature was not purposeful design, but instead came about through a no fore­sight automatic sifting process.

Today, rejecting our biological evolution is like rejecting the fact that the sun gives off heat.  It requires rejecting major chunks of biol­ogy, anthro­pology, geol­­ogy, bio­chem­istry, genetics and phy­sics, plus essentially the scientific method, itself.  Every major sci­en­­tific organi­­za­tion in the U.S. and in most of the world has published state­­­ments support­ing the fact of our evolution.  That roughly 40% of Americans still reject evolution in favor of ancient creation stories speaks volumes.

Improbability arguments re: cows turning into whales

Creationist: “Based on a few fragments of bone, evolutionists are now claiming that whales evolved from cows or hippopotamuses.  What could be more ridiculous or scientifically impossible?”  (In the 1960s and 70s, creationists would show a cartoon slide of a half-whale-half-cow to the audience to loud laughter.) 

Response:  Since the 1970s an ever increasing number of fos­sils have clearly documented the evolu­tion of whales from a four-legged land mam­mal.  In 1989 a 45 mil­lion year old whale fos­sil with small hind legs and feet was found in the sands of Egypt.  A short time later a 50 million year old semi-aquatic pre-whale fos­sil named Pakicetus was found in Pakis­tan with both mammalian fore­arms and hind­ limbs.  Molecular evidence now indicates that the closest living relative to the whale is the hippo, with the whale lin­eage splitting off from the hippo lineage about 54 mya.  A quick web search reveals many sites documenting numerous fossils and the story of whale evolution.

Improbability arguments re: the origin of life

Creationist: “The probability of amino acids randomly hooking together to form even the sim­plest enzyme protein is so small as to be essentially impos­sible. No enzymes, no life.  There­fore, an Intelligent Designer was essential for the creation of life.”

Response: First, since no one can know how life actually began or what form it took, all such improbability arguments by creationists are meaningless nonsense.  Second, “im­pos­sibil­ity” claims of amino acids hooking together to form functional proteins was actually proved wrong over 50 years ago.  Amino acids spon­tan­eously attach to one another in a some­what non-ran­dom fashion and form small chains as determined by their individ­ual molecular structures.  Furthermore, once these small chains have formed they will often automatically self-replicate and double in length.  Indeed, many of the mole­cules found in living organisms today bear evi­dence of having evolved in exactly this way.

In the mid-l950s, Dr. Sidney Fox, a spe­cialist in pro­tein biochem­istry at the Univer­sity of Miami, and his colleagues heated a mixture of amino acids.  The amino acids automatically hooked together to form chains of from 30 to l00 amino acids long.  These “pro­tein­oids,” as Fox named them, were strik­ingly similar to true proteins and, according to Fox, could have served as the raw material from which life evolved.  Furthermore, when these proteinoids were exposed to water they automati­cally formed little spheres which have many properties similar to living cells.  Today there are num­erous published research­ed reports showing that many modern proteins appear to have been derived from a few such ancestral proteins. The error made by creationists is to require that a specific protein enzyme form all at once and give perfect results.  They omit the gradual improve­ments of usable, but imperfect en­zymes by natural selection and the fact that many amino acid sequences may give the same enzyme function.

Improbability arguments re: the existence of living cells

Creationist: “Living cells are the simplest components of life.  Yet, they are much too complex to have evolved, for unless all of the cell components are present at the same time, cells can’t function.  The probability of this happening is vanishing small without intelligent intervention.”

Response: First, microscopic fossil evidence indicates that ancient cells were far simpler than most cells found today.  Second, cells are not the simplest components of life.  In fact, there never has been a clear-cut distinction between what is obviously alive and what is not.  Instead, a continuum exists.

For example, there are viroids which are just short circles of genetic material. Then there are viruses, which consist of genetic material surrounded by a protein coat.  Viruses are not considered alive by most (but not all) scientists.  Recently there was the discovery of a truly monstrous virus known as Mimivirus and which is much more genetically complex than a number of parasitic bacteria.  With the Mimivirus, the boundary between viruses and bacteria became officially blurred.  There is now considerable evidence that viruses were involved very early on in the evolutionary emergence of life.  Most of the genetic material on this planet is viral. Their ability to interact with organisms and to move genetic material around makes viruses major players in driving the evolution of new species.

In addition to viruses, there is a major branch of life composed of an ancient line of microbes without a nucleus known as the Archaea.  The Archaea may make up as much as one-third of all life on earth.  Then there are simple bacteria without a nucleus and more complicated bacteria with a nucleus.  By 1993 scientists had succeeded in creating “creatures” that looked and acted very much like living organisms.  They grew, ate, repro­duced, mutated, fought with each other and died—and they did all this spontane­ously, with­out inter­ference or help from their human creators.[i]  The scientific evidence currently supports the hypothesis that life gradually appeared through an accumulation of genetic typos committed by hordes of mindless microscopic “replication machines”.

Furthermore, the more scientists have learned about liv­ing things, the clearer it has be­come that all of life’s processes, from fertili­zation to the evo­lu­tion of the human brain, appear to be based entirely on chem­ical and physi­cal laws.  No laws of nature have been bypassed or bro­ken. No extra mira­cles or “vi­tal forces” seem to be required.  It just doesn’t seem neces­sary (and hasn’t for a long time now) to posit super­natural inter­ven­tions for the origin of life, or for that matter any aspect of human evolution.[ii]

Improbability arguments from irreducible complexity

Creationist: “All living cells contain complex micro­scopic biochemical machines which have many parts that must all be present at the same time for these machines to work; they can’t function if even one part is missing.  Since the parts do not have any survival value by themselves and since they could not possibly have come together all at once through any known natural evolutionary means, these biochemical machines must have been abruptly designed by an Intelligent Designer.”[iii] 

Response:  All of the examples of supposed irreducible com­plexity have been scientifically refuted.[iv]

In conclusion

People who make the exist­ence of their gods stand or fall based on improbability arguments regarding still unanswered scientific mysteries risk having their gods destroyed in the wake of scientific advances.

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Charles Rulon is an Emeritus, Life Sciences, at Long Beach City College

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[i]Levy, S., Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation -1993.

For current updates, see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-real-promise-of-synthetic-biology

Also follow Craig Venter’s progress: http://biosingularity.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/craig-venter-talks-about-creating-synthetic-life/

[ii] Key web sites for progress on the origin of life problem: <users.aol.com/chinlin3/home.htm>: Devoted to the astro­nom­ical, chemical and biological aspects of the origin of life problem. <eis.jpl.nasa.gov/origins/index2.html>: This is NASA’s “Origins” program page.  <www.sciam.com/askexpert/biology/biology15.html>: A “Scientific American–Ask the Experts” site where concise, up-to-date information on what we know about the origin of life is given.

[iii]Behe, Michael, Darwin‘s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evo­­­l­­u­tion (1996)

[iv]Why Intelligent Design Fails by physicists Mark Young and Taner Edis (Editors).  For extensive web material dealing with the flaws of Behe’s argument, see: <www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm>.  Also <www.miller andlevine.com /km/evol/DI/Design.html> and  <www.antievolution.org>

The Universe: “It’s scientifically too improbable, therefore God must have done it”

By Charles Rulon

Even if it looks to our limited minds that the only possible answer to some current mystery regarding life or the universe is that “God must have done it”, it’s arguably bad theology to claim as much.  This is because the strength of one’s faith now depends on whether or not scien­tists can fill this gap in our knowledge.  Since science has been extremely suc­cess­ful over the last few centuries in replacing “God did it” answers with fruitful naturalistic explanations, the risk of one’s faith being undermined is quite high.  The following are four such examples from the non-living realm.

Planetary orbits

Theist: Our solar system is very stable, with all the planets orbiting the Sun in the same direction and in roughly the same plane.  It’s highly improbable that this could have happened just by random chance, since there are no laws of physics that would have prevented the planets from revolving every which way around the Sun with disastrous effects.  Even Issac Newton believed God was needed to keep the planets from eventually flying away into space or falling into the Sun.  Isn’t this evidence that our solar system had to have been designed and finely tuned by an intelligent creator? 

Response:  But then along came Pierre-Simon de Laplace a century after Newton.  Laplace demonstrated mathematically that our solar system didn’t need God’s intervention to remain stable after all.  In addition, modern theories of solar system formation explained away all of this so-called miraculous planetary motion.  Our planets formed from a pancake-like disk of material that orbited the early Sun.  Conser­vation of angular momentum also explains why such pancake-like disks are so common throughout our universe.[i]

Besides, to make matters worse for the “God did it” folks, the structural details of our solar system are sloppy from an engineer­ing perspective, but just what one might expect if only the blind laws and forces of nature were involved. Plus, modern studies have even demonstrated that contrary to Laplace’s claim the orbits of our planets may eventually become chaotic after all.

The “Big Bang”

Theist: Our universe couldn’t have exploded into existence from nothing.  Therefore, it had to have had a creator.

Response:  According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the energy of a gravitational field is negative and the energy of matter is positive.  Calculations adding up all the matter and all the gravity in the observable universe come out to equal zero.[ii]  As one cosmologist put it: “The universe could come from nothing because it is, fundamentally, nothing.”[iii]

Furthermore, writes physicist Victor Stenger, the laws of physics are those that would be expected to exist if the universe arose mostly by chance from no matter, no energy, no structure and, most significantly, no infor­mation.[iv]  And cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, author of the book, A Universe from Nothing, writes: “The discoveries of modern particle physics and cosmology over the past half century allow not only a possibility that the universe arose from nothing, but in fact make this possibility increasingly plausible.  Every­thing we have measured about the universe is not only consistent with a universe that came from nothing…, but in fact, …makes this possibility ever more likely.”  “The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly.”  Krauss further adds that “nothing”, meaning no space, no time, no laws of nature, is an unstable state and would collapse into something.  “Modern science has made the something-from-nothing debate irrelevant… Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that … ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy. (Indeed, religion and philosophy have added nothing to our understanding of these ideas in millennia.)” [v]

Cosmological coincidences

Theist: Our universe is exquisite­ly fine-tuned for the evolution of life.  In fact, the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle even commented that our uni­verse looks like a “put-up job,” as though some­body had been “monkey­ing with the laws of physics.”  An apt comparison is a safe which can only be opened by registering a complicated series of numbers.  The mathematical odds against opening the safe by randomly spinning the dial are astronomical.  This is strong evidence for an intelligent creator of the universe.

Response: As cosmology and astrophysics continues to advance, a naturalistic expla­nation for all of this apparent fine-tuning has emerged.  It is the multiverse, a gigantic number of universes, each with differ­ent randomly appearing fundamental constants and, therefore, differ­ent proper­ties.  Our uni­­verse just happens by chance to be one of these universes in which the evolution of carbon-based life was pos­sible.  No supernatural designer is now needed; no “amaz­ing coinci­­dences” now need to be explained.

Of course, many theists see the multiverse hypothesis as merely a desperate attempt by atheists grasping at straws to explain away all the amazing cosmological coincidences.  But according to astronomer William Jefferys, the proposed existence of a multiverse is not a response to the apparent fine-tuning of our universe, but a consequence of the current leading theory in cosmology — a theory best supported by the evidence — the theory of chaotic inflation.  One possible consequence of inflation is that the universe contains an infinitely of regions that have each inflated into expanding universes much like ours, but perhaps with physical constants different from ours.  As further evidence, the concept of a multiverse is consistent with a leading model of string theory, which suggests that there could be 10500   possible universes, all with different self-consistent laws and constants.

When asked if scientists will ever be able to prove that the multiverse is real, physicist Andrei Linde responded that nothing else fits the data.  He explained that physicists don’t have any other explanation for the dark energy, or for the mass of the electron, or for the many properties of various particles.  Besides, if nature can produce one universe, why couldn’t it produce many universes? Indeed, it might even be expected.  Physicists know nothing in principle to prevent it.

The “fine-tuned” Earth

Theist: There is a staggering amount of evidence that Earth is not some average planet, but is exquisitely fit to support life.  This amazing evidence all but proves the existence of an intelligent designer.[vi]

Response: In 2010, Geoff March, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley estimated that, judging from his observations, our galaxy may contain tens of billions of planets roughly the size and mass of Earth.[vii]   Thus, with so many planets it’s not surprising that here or there is a planet friendly to life.

Besides, how human-friendly is Earth in the first place? After all, it took over two billion years for even simple multi-cellular life to evolve.  Then it took another two billion years for humans to evolve, an event that included so many accidents and contingencies of history that, were evolution to start over, the big money is on space-age intelligent beings never evolving again.  In addition, catastro­phic events such as meteor impacts, gigantic volcanic eruptions, ice ages and plate tectonic movements tearing apart entire continents have devastated Earth’s surface for eons, resulting in at least five major mass extinctions over the last 600 million years.  Surely there might be other planets much more suited for the evolution of advanced species than Earth was.

Has science disproved God?

There are still a number of cosmologists who believe that the arguments for a multiverse are questionable.  Also, they observe that the “multiverse answer” still leaves ultimate questions unresolved, such as did the multiverse come into existence through necessity, chance or purpose?  Furthermore, they point out that proof of other universes radically different from our own may permanently lie beyond the domain of science.[viii]

Perhaps modern science is not incompatible with the idea that there could be some kind of “higher mind or intelligence or purpose” behind our universe’s existence.  But so far no such purpose or “intelligent designer” seems apparent or necessary.  Besides, as Krauss, Dawkins and numerous other non-theistic scientists have emphasized, there is no logical connection between some kind of “intelligence” behind the universe and the interventionist, genocidal, sin-punishing, prayer answering God of the world’s major religions.

Besides, if humans actually are central to some kind of master plan then, skeptics ask, why is our universe so unfathomably huge and old and violent?  Black holes suck in entire star systems.  Gigantic explosions at the center of galaxies destroy millions of worlds.  Also, why does this “master plan” have our universe expanding faster and faster, only to eventually once again become “nothing”?

Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics, sees no evidence for God in our universe and observes: “If we were to see the hand of a designer anywhere, it would be in the funda­mental principles, the laws of nature.  But contrary to some assertions they appear to be utterly impersonal and without any special role for life.” [ix]

Of course, many major scientific questions remain and always will.  Of course, scientists can only attempt to answer empiri­cally testable questions.  Of course, just because a phenome­non can be explained naturally doesn’t mean that some kind of “god” had nothing to do with it.  Yet, as scientific know­ledge has continued to advance over the last 400 years, supernatural explanations for events have con­tinued to retreat and retreat….and retreat. Today all relevant scientific evidence—from astrophysics, evolutionary biology and bio­chemistry, to the lack of any solid evidence for the existence of paranormal or supernatural events—strongly supports the conclusion (at least in the minds of non-theists) that there never were any gods in the first place, certainly not in any kind of mani­festation that is of interest to the overwhelming majority of Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious folk.

———————————————————————-                                                Charles Rulon  is an Emeritus, Life Sciences, Long Beach City College

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[i]See “A Universe of Disks” by Omer Blaes in Scientific American, October 2004, p. 50+.

[iii] Lemley, Brad. “Guth’s Grand Guess”, Discover, April 2002.

[iv] Stenger, Victor; God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. <http://www.colorado.edu/ philosophy/vstenger/VWeb/Home.html>.  Also: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html

[vi]For example, see the 2000 book Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and the 2004 book The Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

[vii] Discover, Jan./Feb. 2011, p. 34

[viii] Ellis, George. “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?”; Scientific American, August 2011.

[ix]Weinberg, Steven, 2001, A Designer Universe?  Skeptical Inquirer, Sept./Oct. 2001.

Six reasons for avoiding “God did it” answers to scientific questions

by Charles L. Rulon

 

 ”God did it” answers have historically yielded to scientific explanations

Repeatedly, super­natural explanations for physical events (such as comets, eclipses, earth­quakes, lightning, plagues, design in nature, Cambrian fossil explosion) later turned out to be scientifically explain­able. Even questions surrounding the origin of our universe, its apparent fine-tuning and the origin of life are yielding to scientific investigation. As scientific know­ledge continued to advance over the past 400 years, supernatural explanations for events con­tinued to retreat and retreat.  Many scientists faced with such a consistent trend have extrapo­lated to the conclusion that all of our earthly gods are non-existent and our holy books merely human creations.

 Today, some Christian, Jewish and Islamic theologians still reject all scientific findings that disagree with a literal reading of their holy books.  Others spend considerable time re-defining and reinter­preting words and phrases in their holy books to try to make the Genesis creation stories, Noah’s Ark and other miraculous events fit established scientific discoveries.  Still others have accepted the findings of science, but still see God as somehow intimately and actively involved in all natural processes.  But the efforts of these theologians are all one-sided; it is they who are continuously reacting or adjusting to scientific advances, not the other way around.  If some supernatural intelligent entity does exist, this entity seems to be working strictly through the laws of nature.

“God did it” is bad science

 Scien­tists don’t fall back on supernatural interventions to explain mysteries about the physical universe, not because they are closed-minded or non-theists, but simply because “God did it” answers are dead ends.  Such answers don’t open doors to new discoveries, new pre­dic­­tions, or productive research.  We’ll never get closer to discover­ing how life and the universe work by rubber stamping our gaps in scientific knowl­edge with “God did it” proclamations.  By insisting on natural­istic answers our reliable scientific knowledge has exploded. Over one million scientific research papers are now being pub­­lished yearly.

“God did it” is bad theology

 Even if it looks to our limited minds that “God did it” is the only possible answer to some physical aspect of our existence, it’s still bad theology to claim as much.  This is because the strength of one’s faith now depends on whether or not scien­tists can fill this gap in our knowledge.  Since scientists have been extremely suc­cess­ful over the last few centuries in replacing “God did it” answers with fruitful naturalistic explanations, the risk of one’s faith being undermined is quite high.

“God did it” answers can border on blasphemy

 Some liberal Christians have written that it borders on blasphemy to claim that their all-loving God would personally and purposely place His favorite creations on a planet destined to experience catas­trophic disasters that can even result in global mass extinctions.  Or consider our biological evolution.  Rejecting evolution is like rejecting the fact that the sun gives off heat.  It requires rejecting major chunks of biol­ogy, anthro­pology, geol­­ogy, bio­chem­istry, genetics and phy­sics, plus essentially the scientific method, itself.  Today, every major sci­en­­tific organi­­za­tion in the U.S. and in most of the world has published statements support­ing the fact of our evolution.  Yet, roughly 40% of Americans still reject evolution in favor of ancient creation myths.  Such widespread denial not only speaks volumes regarding our educational systems, but also borders on blasphemy.  Consider:

It borders on blasphemy to claim that God would purposely deceive liter­ally hundreds of thous­ands of dedicated scientists by making it look in every last detail as though evolution has occurred over the last several billion years.  It borders on blasphemy to claim that an all-wise, all-good God would have purposely created the overwhelming majority of all His species to be deadly parasites, which they are.  It borders on blasphemy to claim that God specially created us to have dozens of what appear to be poor engi­neering designs and anatom­ical defects, including our human brain with enough serious defects to fill neurology and psychi­atric text books and is now endangering our entire biosphere.  Prominent evolutionary biologist (and theist) Francisco Ayala had this to say regarding all of our apparent designer defects: “Not only can natural selection account for the ‘design’ of organisms, but also it amounts to blasphemy to attribute it to God’s special action.”[i]

“God did it” answers encourage the rejection of rationality

Another problem in fostering belief in “God did it” answers to scientific questions is that humans then find it much easier to reject the scientific method, take leaps of faith and believe in an amaz­ing diversity of disproved or highly question­able para­normal and super­natural things such as demons, angels, hell, purgatory, auras, virgin births, resur­rec­tions, faith healings, exorcisms, voices from Atlantis, omens, spirit signals, reincarnations, judg­­ment days, astro­logy, voodoo, fairies, vampires, zombies, witches, telekinesis, warlocks, ghosts, poltergeists, tarot cards, ouija boards, num­er­ology, and on and on and on.  

Also, once we grant the possibility of “God did it” answers to the workings of the universe, then we’ve strengthened the possibility of God’s miracles being in everything all the time.  For example, perhaps this god really did create the world only 6,000 years ago, but made it appear exact­ly as if it had evolved natu­rally over bill­ions of years, fossils and all.  Or maybe the earth is flat after all, according to the Flat Earth Society’s reading of selected biblical passages (see Dan. 4: 11, 20; Rev. 7:1; Is. 41: 5 and 40:28), but God makes us believe otherwise to test our faith.

“God did it” answers buttress justification for atrocities

 Throughout history humans have used their gods to justify slavery, the oppression of women, holy wars, inquisitions, crusades, jihads, the torture and burning of witches and homo­sexuals, the stoning to death of non-virgin brides and those caught work­ing on holy days, and even the extermi­na­tion of entire heathen cult­ures and inferior races.  Maybe God even manipulated events and people so that the United States would go to war with Iraq and then Iran in order to speed along the Apocalypse.

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Charles L. Rulon,    Emeritus, Life Sciences,       Long Beach City College

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[i] “Arguing For Evolution” by Francisco Ayala, The Science Teacher, February 2000 (vol. 67, no. 2), pp. 30-32. Ayala is in the Department of Ecology and Evol­u­tion, University of California, Irvine.

C Rulon: Biological Evolution: Replacing scientific fact with creationism can border on blasphemy

By   Charles L. Rulon,  Emeritus, Life Sciences

Long Beach City College

To insist that God abruptly created all of the different major kinds of life can be tantamount to blasphemy in the minds of liberal theists.  Consider:

Violent earth: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that an all-loving God would purposely place His favorite creations on a planet destined to experience catas­trophic disasters, including gigan­tic vol­can­ic eruptions, ice sheets cover­ing much of the planet, devastating tsunamis and earth­quakes, plate tectonic move­ments that tear apart entire conti­nents and asteroid bombardments that have resulted in global mass extinctions?

 Evolution: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that God would deceive liter­ally hundreds of thous­ands of dedicated scientists by making it look in every last detail as though evolution via natural selec­tion has been at work for the last several billion years? This includes data converging from a dozen different scientific disci­plines, along with millions of fossils spanning billions of years that all but spell out evol­u­tion. Isn’t it tantamount to blasphemy to even imply that the God of the Jews and Christians would personally carry out such a monumental deception?

Parasites: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that the all-wise, all-good God of Abraham would have purposely created the overwhelming majority of all His species to be deadly parasites, which they are?  Indeed, the study of our living world is, for the most part, the study of parasites.  To insist that the God of the universe created a parasite that blinds millions of people, or 10,000 dif­fer­ent species of tape­worms, or 2000 different species of disease-spread­ing biting lice, or thousands upon thousands of dif­ferent species of harm­ful bacteria, viruses and protozoa, or dozens of species of mal­aria-transmit­ting mosqui­toes is tantamount to blasphemy.  On the other hand, an abundance of parasites is just what one would expect if only natural selection were at work.

Blood sports: Consider cheetahs: they seem perfectly designed to kill gazelles.  Their eyes, teeth, claws and muscles are all what one might ex­pect if God’s pur­pose in designing cheetahs was to maximize their ability to catch and kill gazelles.  But now look at gazelles.  They also have been optimally designed to escape from cheetahs.  It looks just like cheetahs were designed by one god and gazelles by a rival god.  Either that or God made both because He’s a sadist into blood sports.  So, doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that God instantly created cheetahs and gazelles rather than to accept their evolution through natural selection?

Extinctions: Over 99% of all the billions of species to have ever inhabited earth sooner or later went extinct. Also, several mass extinctions in which up to 90% of all species on the planet went extinct have been documented in the fos­sil record.  If this is God’s purposeful handiwork, doesn’t that suggest a god that’s waste­ful, inept, care­less and uncon­cerned with the wel­fare of his cre­a­tions?  But since such thoughts are considered blasphemous, many Christians refuse to accept that ex­tinctions have actually occurred, or try to explain away the evidence with mythologies like Noah’s flood.

Oddities and Defects: The human body defi­nitely seems to be a marvelous ‘feat of engineering’.  For those who don’t understand the awesome power of natural selection working on continuous genetic variability over hundreds of millions of years, it’s easy to conclude that God specially created us.  But then that also means that God Almighty, Lord of the universe, must also be given the credit for all of our anatom­ical oddities such as nipples in males, plus dozens of what appear to be poor engi­neering designs or anatom­ical defects.

Examples of defects include an appendix that can be life-threatening; a birth canal that’s too small in females resulting in ex­tremely painful and often dangerous deliveries, with the deaths of untold numbers of women and new­borns throughout history; a miscarriage rate of over 60 percent; males with a pro­s­­tate gland that enlarges with age, blocks urination and inevitably becomes cancerous; a windpipe right next to our esophagus so that we can choke to death on a bite of food; males with extremely sen­si­tive testes vul­nerably exposed all the time instead of being withdrawn into the body as is done in numerous other mammals; our human brain with enough serious defects to fill neurology and psychi­atric text books and is now endangering the entire biosphere.

Rationalists can’t help but comment that if the above anatomi­cal and physiological ar­rangements really did originate from God, then God is either a sadist, a practical joker with a sick sense of humor, or needs to go back to design school.  On the other hand, if only natural selection is at work, then all of the above oddities and defects have perfectly natural explanations.

Prominent evolutionary biologist (and theist) Francisco Ayala had this to say regarding these apparent designer defects: “Not only can natural selec­tion account for the ‘design’ of organisms, but also it amounts to blasphemy to attribute it to God’s special action.” Ayala adds: “The defective design of organisms could be attributed to the gods of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, who fought with one another, made blunders and were clumsy in their endeavors. But, in my view, it is not compatible with a special action by the omnis­cient and omni­potent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”[i]

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[i] “Arguing For Evolution” by Francisco Ayala, The Science Teacher, February 2000 (vol. 67, no. 2), pp. 30-32. Ayala is in the Department of Ecology and Evol­u­tion, University of California, Irvine.

C Rulon: God, Natural Theology & the Argument from Design

By Charles L. Rulon     Emeritus, Life Sciences   Long Beach City College

A favorite argument for the existence of God(s) from the ancient Greeks up to 1859 was the argument from design. The incredible design of the human eye, the bird’s wing, the human brain and all the harmony in nature could not have happened by chance. Where there is design, there must be a designer. After all, what are the odds of all this design happening by chance? It’s like believing that scraps of metal could be randomly thrown together to create a 747. God was truly everywhere.

As a result, in the 1700s and early 1800s many in England turned to nature to study the products of God’s Creation in an attempt to learn more about the mind of God. Butterfly and shell collections were proudly displayed in homes as the equivalent of the Bible laid open on the coffee table. Those who would study God’s works (nature) began to be seen as theologians as much as those who would study His word (the Bible). Natural history became transformed into Natural Theology and in the early 1800s nature books even outsold novels. Humans and nature belonged to an almighty purpose and the study of nature’s biological wonders revealed God’s personal concern for humanity.

The English theologian William Paley in 1802 became well known because of his comparison of the complex design in nature to that of a watch. To loosely quote Paley: “Look, if I found a watch on the beach, I would obviously know that all of the parts of the watch didn’t fly together just by accident. I would know that there had to have been a watchmaker. Well, the human eye is much more complex than a watch. So is a beautifully camouflaged butterfly. All of this design obviously proves the existence of an unbelievably intelligent and enormously powerful designer. He had to have been incredibly precise and creative in order to make a livable habitat for all the creatures He designed. The human mind, in particular, is a product of such high quality and complexity that it had to have been designed by a craftsman of infinite skill. That means that He has to be a personal being who cares for his creatures. This designer has to be the Christian God!”

However, there were many critics of Natural Theology, in particular the two famous philosophers and empiricists of the late 1700s, David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In addition, criticisms of Natural Theology continued to grow as more and more scientific discoveries were made related to faulty biological designs, to the appearance of fossils of extinct species, and to earth being extremely old. Some of these criticisms were as follows:

Critic 1: “Even if there is a designer, that doesn’t mean he’s your Christian God. Suppose I find a watch that has design flaws. Doesn’t that tell me the watchmaker is inept? So what about all of the design flaws in humans, like our useless appendix that ruptures, or our wisdom teeth that are mostly impacted, or our wind pipe right next to our esophagus so that we can choke to death on a bite of food, or the birth canal being too small, resulting in hundreds of  thousands of deaths at childbirth? And what about nipples in males? Doesn’t all this prove that your designer god is inept and maybe even mean-spirited?”

Critic 2: “Also, to use your watch analogy, there are lots of different watch-makers, so maybe there are also lots of different designers. Besides, just because all watches have watchmakers, why should it follow that a butterfly has to have a butterfly maker? After all, everyone’s seen a watchmaker, but no one has ever seen a butterfly maker. Maybe there’s some unknown law of nature responsible for making the butterfly and we’re just not smart enough to figure it out.”

And so it went – back and forth – back and forth. Supporters of Natural Theology absolutely knew that God’s goodness and intelligent design was real and, for hundreds of years, continued to present arguments as proof. And for hundreds of years these arguments were rebutted by the critics who pointed out all the cruelty and suffering in the animal world — and all the parasites — and all the extinctions. But the believers had answers for everything.

So why wasn’t either side able to convince the other? Was it because believers had some secret proof unknown to the skeptics, or vice versa? No. Was it because one or the other had just carelessly overlooked the invalidity of their arguments. No. If it were any of these, this issue would have been settled long ago. All the cards were on the table for everyone to see, yet intelligent human beings still continued to disagree over them.

So why wasn’t either side able to convince the other? One reason was blind faith. Another was the fact that well-designed species actually existed. What other possible explanation than “God (or a universal mind) did it” could there be for the existence of all these different species (including us), each with intricate adaptations and designs? If we weren’t created by some kind of super intelligent designer or designers, then how did we get here?”

As a result, even though many scientists and philosophers, especially on the European continent, no longer believed in Natural Theology, biology was still very much tied to theology. How could it be otherwise? All the design in nature obviously demanded a Designer. All of the different species obviously demanded a Creator. As a result,

almost all scientists and philosophers in the early 1800s were either Christian men to some degree, or at least were deists. Also, virtually all the naturalists in England in the early 1800s were ordained ministers, as were the professors at Cambridge who taught botany and geology.

 The Origin of Species

Then in 1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published. The Origin seriously challenged several major pillars of Christian dogma, in particular special creation, the design argument and man’s unique status. God was no longer required as an explanatory factor for all of the design in nature. Instead, The Origin contained considerable argument and evidence to show first, that the evolution of species had really occurred and second, that species could evolve naturally and automatically without guidance or foresight through a process called natural selection. Natural selection could explain the evolution of eyes, of wings and of all the different species, including their many defects. It could explain why species go extinct and why there are far more parasitic species than free-living ones.

The Origin sold out on the first day of publication and subsequently went through six editions and the world has never been the same since. It was the book that “shook the world.” It was to eventually bring about one of the greatest paradigm shifts in scientific, philosophical and religious thinking in the history of the world!

From the moment of its publication Darwin’s fundamental ideas inspired intense reactions ranging from ferocious condemnation to ecstatic allegiance. Most of Darwin’s Victorian contemporaries bitterly opposed and ridiculed the idea that man might have descended from an ape. For scientists and philosophers alike, from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant, man was a creature above and apart from other living beings. He held a unique position in God’s Creation. He had a soul. There was no possible transition from animal to man.

But there were many who supported Darwin. One was Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and one of the founders of meteorology. On reading Darwin’s book, Galton wrote him the following letter: “My Dear Darwin, I always think of you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of superstition. I used to be wretched under the weight of the old-fashioned arguments from design, [which I felt were worthless, but unable to prove it]. Consequently, the appearance of your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and [gave] me freedom of thought.”

An Ancient, Rational, “Scientific,” Perspective on Reality

By Juan Bernal

Over two thousand years ago the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretious (99-55 BCE), expressed a surprisingly modern philosophy, one which he got from a more ancient philosopher, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE).

A recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, recounts how the text of Lucretious’ great poem, “On the Nature of Things,” was discovered at the dawn of the Renaissance (1400s).   In this poem, Lucretious developed an atomistic, materialistic view of reality, one which offers a naturalistic explanation of the world and humanity, and which denies the relevance of the gods and attacks all religions for their superstition and exploitation of fear.

The book recounts the story in which the philosophy of Lucretious was rejected and condemned by the Christian world, but also admired and valued by a few courageous early humanists.  Greenblatt’s work is worth reading and has much to teach us regarding the discovery and reclamation of ancient works by scholars and humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries AD, and the extent to which Christian authorities and their ‘scholars’ repressed the philosophy of Epicurus/Lucretious.

Here I will limit myself to a summary of some of the main ideas that the poem advances.

To those not familiar with the philosophy of Epicurus (341-270 BCE), we can summarize some of it by stating that he  advocated rational living,  pleasure and happiness as the natural ends of life.  His view of ‘pleasure’ was that it should be consistent with intelligence and moderation; he emphasized the joys of the mind over corporeal, material pleasure.   Since, he accepted the atomism of Democritus, he denied the reality of gods, ghosts, and disembodied beings that survived death of the body; and he added the elements of chance, theorizing that atoms swerve into each other to combine into composite things and explain human free will.

This is the philosophy that Lucretious expresses in his poem.  Some of the main points of that philosophy are summarized by Greenblatt in chapter 8, “The Way Things Are.”  Here he writes that

 “a charge frequently leveled against him [Lucretious], when his poem began once again to be read—is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do.” 

In short, Lucretious held that the gods were irrelevant to natural and human reality.  They did not explain how the world began nor did they intervene in history and human affairs. Greenblatt also notes that

“…much of what “On the Nature of Things” claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work’s core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed.”

. The point here is the astonishing extent to which the philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretious anticipates significant aspects of modern science.  Consider some of the elements that constituted the Lucretian challenge (taken from Ch 8 of Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve – How the world became modern):

Everything is made of invisible particles.

The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of the things”—are eternal. Time is not limited—a discrete substance with a beginning and an end—but infinite. The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory.

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upper hand; the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored:

The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.

 All particles are in motion in an infinite void.

Space, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles, or ends, and no limits. Matter is not packed together in a solid mass. There is a void in things, allowing the constitutive particles to move, collide, combine, and move apart.  .  .  .

The universe consists then of matter—the primary particles and all those particles come together to form—and space, intangible and empty. Nothing else exists.

The universe has no creator or designer.  The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy. What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. No supreme choreographer planned their movements, and the seeds of things did not have a meeting in which they decided what would go where.

There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

Nature ceaselessly experiments. There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establishing themselves, until changing circumstances make it impossible for them any longer to survive. The successful adaptations, like the failures, are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time.

The universe was not created for or about humans. The earth—with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases—was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home.

. . . The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever. On the contrary, it is clear that, over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us, which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

Humans are not unique. They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well. The invisible particles out of which living things, including humans, are composed are not sentient nor do they come from some mysterious source. We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of. Humans do not occupy the privileged place in existence they imagine for themselves…

Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradaisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature’s abundance. Early humans, lacking fire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have been some rudimentary capacity for social cooperation in the interest of survival, but the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. . .  The idea that language was somehow given to humans, as a miraculous invention, is absurd. Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things.  .  .  . . The arts of civilization—not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fashioned by the shared talents and mental power of the species—are accomplishments worth celebrating, but they are not unmixed blessings. They arose in tandem with the fear of the gods, the desire for wealth, the pursuit of fame and power. All of these originated in a craving for security, a craving that reaches back the earliest experiences of the human species struggling to master its natural enemies. That violent struggle—against the wild beasts that threatened human survival—was largely successful, but the anxious, acquisitive, aggressive impulses have metastasized. In consequence, human beings characteristically develop weapons that turn against themselves.

The soul dies. The human soul is made of the same material as the human body.

There is no afterlife. Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. … But once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have.

 

Death is nothing to us. When you are dead—when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart—there will be neither pleasure nor pain, neither longing nor fear.

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess. Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams.

Religions are invariably cruel. Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. This is why they are drawn to fantasies of retribution and why they inevitably stir up anxiety among their adherents. The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits of any kind do not exist.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear.  .  .  .  Why are humans so unhappy? The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy of infinite pleasure helps to account for their proneness to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies—all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news. It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they the gods or because they nobly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason..  .  .  . What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation—all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living—must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

Obviously, there is much here that anticipates modern thought:  atomic physics, a natural cosmology, biological evolution, a naturalistic, physical explanation of the earth, life, and human culture, anthropological theory, secular humanism and a rejectionl of religious superstition (denial an after-life, denial of the relevance and reality of supernatural beings.)  It is small wonder that Christian authorities did all they could to repress and stop publication of the poem.      As Greenblatt states it:

“On the Nature of Things” is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a great poem.  .  .  .  .  .   Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.”

 

More on the Confusion regarding ‘Representations’ and the Objects represented

By Juan Bernal

Something that the neurologist Antonio Demasio asserted reinforced the old belief that our experience of the world is at best an indirect experience of “representations” of that world.

 

An email correspondent, Spano,  remarked:

“Yesterday, in Antonio Damasio’s interview with Ira Flatow on Science Friday, Damasio frequently used the word “representation.” He spoke of the brain as producing a representation of our internal and external environments on the basis of inputs. He apparently assumes that “the represented” is not directly available to us, but is known only indirectly via a representation.”

Moi  Here we go again with this business of “input to the brain” and “represented stuff not directly available to us”!

Far too many people — mainly philosophers and psychologists — and now Antonio Damasio  (of all people!)  —- assume that it makes sense to think of “us” (the knowing subject) as somehow situated inside the brain.  Sure, if you think of the subject (who perceives and has experiences) as located inside the brain or identical to the brain, then a mystery arises as to how the subject (the person?) interprets that input, which may or may not represent external reality.  But why in the world do we have to accept this queer perspective?  None of us are inside our brains (or alternatively, we are not identical to our brains) and then have to try make sense of input from the outside?

The fact that is overlooked is that human beings (the persons) have brains which enables them to learn about their environment.  In other words, the human subject exists and operates in that ‘external’ environment.  Science, neurology and the cognitive sciences, can investigate and analyze the process by which the brain allows the animal (or person, or subject that perceives) to perceive and learn about his environment.  In the process of such an investigation one may speak about “input to the brain.”   But this is not to be understood as “input to the subject or person,” although it may correctly be called “input to the brain.”  The brain is an organ of the body; the person and his embodied mind exist in the world of objects, animals, cities, and apple trees.  They’re already in that world which, according to the ‘skeptical’ perspective is allegedly not directly accessible to us.  The very idea of “gaining knowledge of the world” is an idea which only makes sense in a social context, of an environment in which people exist among other people, in a natural and social environment which they know about and with which they interact.  Given all this, it makes little sense to introduce the fictional subject isolated and entombed inside a brain, trying to make sense of input from outside the brain.

Does all this ignore the function of the brain/mind in “constructing” (at least in part) that which we experience, e.g., the object that we see?

No it does not.  I simply do notn’t draw the inferences that Spano draws.

Spano asks:

“Why does Damasio make a represented/representation distinction? Because the role of the brain/mind in constructing a representation is all too obvious. It was obvious to the British empiricists and to Kant, . . . ”

Moi:   Of course, there is often a call for this distinction between the object as my brain/mind presents it and the object which is not equivalent to my presentation.  For example, suppose that I’m familiar with a particular piece of hardware which is part of a ground radar system.  What I see when I look at it will be very different from what others, who might not be familiar with the equipment, see.  Those who like to talk in terms of the “representation and the represented” will say that different persons looking at the equipment have different ‘representations.’  We could even allow the figurative talk which states that we see different things.  I see that part of the radar receiver which modulates the incoming radar signal, changing its configuration so that the signal can eventually be a visual target at the radar scope.  You might just see a gray box with connections to other gray boxes.

But none of this implies (or logically requires) that none of our visual ‘representations’ can provide information about the real object.  They all do, but at different levels of complexity.  To admit that my ‘representation’ differs from your ‘representation’ is not to imply that any of us are out of contact with the real world.  In my example, the ‘real world object’ is the radar system that radar engineers created; and there is absolutely no reason for concluding that nobody has access (perceptual or otherwise) to this reality.  To the extent that the British Empiricists and Kant inferred ‘non-reality’ from representation, they completely misunderstood the implication of the term ‘representation’ in this context.

Yes, scientific analysis proves that the brain/mind contributes many aspects of the object that we perceive. I might even agree with the statement that the brain/mind constructs much of what I perceive.  In his book, Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett discusses much of this work of the brain in constructing and filling in large parts of what we perceive.  Those of us who call ourselves scientific realists do not deny this.  What some of us deny is that this scientific analysis of the visual-neurological process of perception shows that we do not perceive the real world.  What such analysis discloses are the processes (mostly neurological processes) which make possible our experience of the real world.  To think that we experience only a questionable ‘representation’ of something else which we cannot describe, as Spano seems to do, seems reasonable only when one assumes that we must explain how we access the external world from a strictly subjectivist perspective (we are ‘inside’ the brain or the mind and must explain how we can know anything about external reality?).

But maybe I have all this wrong?  Maybe we are deceived into thinking that the world we know is real, when in fact it is just a fictional story concocted by our brain/mind.  Of course, this scenario is hard to square with the fact that our brain-mind evolved to help the animal survive and flourish in its natural environment, which surely is a real world.

Spano repeats:

Yesterday, in Antonio Damasio’s interview with Ira Flatow on Science Friday, Damasio frequently used the word “representation.” He spoke of the brain as producing a representation of our internal and external environments on the basis of inputs. He apparently assumes that “the represented” is not directly available to us, but is known only indirectly via a representation.  

Moi:  I don’t dispute that the “brain produces representations of our internal states and external environment on the basis of inputs.”

But this neurological fact does not imply that “the represented is not directly available to us,” unless the “us” at issue is the brain itself (or a homunculus inside the brain?) receiving and translating those inputs.

These neurological processes (the brain receiving and processing input) enable the subject (person, animal) to perceive and negotiate the environment in which the subject exists.  In other words, the neurological processes are part of the bodily operations that make the environment directly available to us.  (Is this too easy a reply to all this talk of the representation and the unknowable ‘represented’?)

The subject who experiences and interacts with the world and the world (environment) experienced come as one package. The person, as a corporeal being, has a brain which functions in particular ways to enable the subject to function in his environment.  We should not separate one for the other and then talk about “inputs to the brain which are representations of a reality that the subject cannot directly access.”   Well, you can separate them, but only as a thought experiment.  Descartes indulges his hyperbolic doubt and gives his ‘cogito’ argument for his absolutely certain ‘knowledge’ that the thinking subject alone is real.  But this is just a thought experiment.  It does not show that a thinking subject can exist in isolation from everything else.  Similar statements can be the made about other thought experiments:  John Locke’s claim that we directly experience only ideas, or Hume’s claim that all we have is the subject and his impressions (and the irrational belief that these represents real objects).  Following this is Berkeley’s thought experiment: All that we take to be material reality can be reconfigured as modifications of the subject’s perceptual ideas; i.e. for any perceptual object, to be is the same as “to be perceived.”

The Classical British Empiricists and much of Western Epistemological thought in the 18th – 19th centuries  (even up to the ‘sense datum’ theorists of the 20th century, including Bertrand Russell)  made too much of these thought experiments.    They took on the skeptical problem of showing how knowledge is possible given a subjective perspective, a problem for which Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy offered a possible solution.

These famous thought experiments do not alter the fact that human beings are biological creatures who evolved with a nervous system suitable to the environment in which these beings exist.  The evolved large brain and sense faculties enable the human being to apprehend many features of his environment, interact with it (cause certain changes in the environment;  be affected by external causes and conditions), There is no general skeptical problem of having to show how the human subject’s perceptual experience accesses an external reality, although, of course, there are specific skeptical problems with regard to illusions, delusions, experiences affected by strange conditions (both subjective and objective ones).   But these come up in the context of a generally reliable mechanism (brain, sense faculties) for apprehending and negotiating the environment.

Any thought experiment which proposes that the subject can be conceived in isolation from the external world, which includes the social world of other people, of language, meanings, and concepts, proposes a fictional scenario.  It is a fiction because all of these thought experiments “smuggle in” essential elements form the external, social world.  Primary among these is language. The thought experiments utilize words, meanings, and concepts which require some natural language, which in turn is a social phenomenon.  Language cannot be a private exercise, private to the subject in isolation from everything else.  The notion of a subject existing in complete isolation from its natural and social environment is mostly a philosopher’s fantasy.

In short, all that “floundering about in the swamp” of Western epistemology could have been avoided.

C Rulon: Pro-Choice Christians (Supported by Biblical Passages)

By Charles L. Rulon

Pro-choice Christians

Today, tens of millions of American Christians are pro-choice.  For the last several decades, dozens of different Christian and Jewish groups have supported ex­cellent contracep­tion, emer­gency contra­cep­tive pills and a woman’s right to choose.  The Religious Coalition for Repro­duc­tive Choice (RCRC) repre­sents over 40 different denomina­tions and faith groups in this coun­try.  They argue that since major re­li­gious sects in the U.S. strongly disagree among themselves on the abor­tion issue, this issue obvious­ly cannot be a “strug­gle between the God-fearing and the God­less”, as often portrayed by the anti-choice activists.   RCRC surveys have found that wide­spread sup­port exists among Christ­ian and Jewish organiza­tions for repro­ductive choice, including safe, early abor­tions.[i]

There is also a Catholic organiza­tion, Cath­olics For Free Choice. They empha­size that Cath­olics who are con­vinced that their conscience is correct,  must follow their con­science rather than the dic­tates of the Church.[ii]  In both France and Italy, countries which are 80-90% Catholic, abor­tion is legal and paid for by the state during the first trimester.  Most European Catholics do not believe that an em­bryo or young fetus has the same sacred value or inalienable right to life as does a newborn.

For pro-Christians, the Christian God is pro-choice.  They refer to a number of relevant biblical passages to support their position.  And since the Bible is vague about the time of ensoulment, some believe that souls can only thrive in wanted pregnancies, others that the soul can only enter fetuses after the brain and body have be­come sufficient­ly develop­ed to receive a soul.  For still others, it’s when breathing becomes potentially possible.

These pro-choice Christians believe that women are mor­ally equal to men and capable of making their own tough ethical decisions regarding abor­tion.  They believe that God would not want us to try to force the eighty million women on our planet who have unplanned preg­nancies each year to stay pregnant against their will.  By supporting choice they believe they’re do­ing God’s work by help­ing to end mas­sive debil­ita­t­ing infec­tions and excruci­a­­ting deaths from il­legal abor­tions for millions of desperate women.  To quote Reverend Ann Fowler, Episcopal priest,  “To talk theologically about women’s rights to choose is to talk about justice, equality, health and wholeness, and respect for the full humanity and autonomy of every woman.”

Bible passages used to support abortion choice

Just as anti-choice Christians have interpreted selected biblical passages to support their posi­tion, so have pro-choice supporters found passages to support their position.  Here are a few:

a. Given the hundreds of laws, moral edicts and com­mandments in the Bible, mostly telling followers what they cannot do, the fact that the Bible (including all the pronounce­ments by both Jesus and the Apostle Paul) is completely silent regarding both elective abortions and the time of ensoulment speaks volumes.

b. Exodus 21:22 refers to an invol­untary mis­carriage as a re­sult of a woman being caught in the middle of a fight.  Of sig­nifi­cance here is that the woman’s life is held to be much more valu­able than that of the abort­ed fetus.

c. In Numbers 5: 11-31, God tells Moses (accord­ing to one interpretation) to have a priest mix a potion that might produce an abortion if a man’s wife has become preg­nant by another man.

d. The Bible is clear that a person does not begin at con­ception, but with breathing.  In Genesis 2:7, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being” (in some translations, “a living soul.”) The Hebrew word for a human being or living soul is nephesh, the word for “breath”.  “Nephesh” occurs over 700 times in the Bible as the identify­ing factor in human life.  Thus, if the fetus is not breath­ing (or if its lungs have not yet formed, making breathing impossible – before the 24th week) it is not yet a person in God’s eyes.

e. In Genesis 38 Judah mistakes Tamar as a prostitute and orders her to be burned to death despite the fact that she is pregnant.  Yet, if her twin fetuses had been considered persons, the law would have delayed her execution until the twins were born.

f. The Incarnation, or the “Word made Flesh” (John 1:14) was celebrated at Jesus’ birth, not at the speculative time of Mary’s conception.  This biblical tradi­tion is followed today, since we count age from the date of birth rather than from conception. The state issues no conception certificates, only birth certificates. It issues no death certificates for fertilized eggs that do not im­plant or for miscarriages.

 g. In Numbers 3:15, only male babies older than one month were to be counted as persons.

h. Jesus said of Judas: “It would be better for him if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24). In effect, Jesus is saying that it would have been better if Judas’ mother had had a miscarriage or an abortion.   And by extension, couldn’t one argue that all mothers whose chil­dren will likely grow up to denounce Jesus should have abor­tions?

i. Ecclesi­astes 3 tells us that “To every thing there is a season… a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which has been planted…”  Is this just referring to agricul­tural advice, or does it, instead, refer to abortion. The Japanese refer to abortions as “thin­ning seedlings.”  Both the Japa­nese and the ancient Heb­rews were close to the soil; it was natural for them to discuss hu­man af­fairs in agri­cult­ural terms. The good farmer plucks up those seedlings that have been planted too close to others.  Like­wise, the good wife and mother aborts those “seedlings” that come too close together in time to permit good mothering or survival of all.

Thou shalt not murder

Christians who oppose choice respond by quoting the 6th Commandment, “Thou shalt not murder (Exodus 20).  But by so doing they conveniently ignore all those God-sanctioned killings that were “excep­tions” to this Command­ment—kill­ings that would be considered barbaric in mod­ern humane societies.  For example, the Old Testament god instructs his follow­ers to kill those who work on the Sabbath (Exodus 31:15; 35:2), to kill children who curse their parents (Exodus 21:17; Lev. 20:9; Deut. 21:18-21) and to stone to death brides found not to be virgins on their wedding night (Deut. 22:13-21). A husband even had this god’s auth­or­ity to kill his wife and children if they pressured him to change his religion (Deut. 13:6-10).

Vir­gin girls also could be righteously offered to angry mobs to protect male guests from harm.  In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:6-8), Lot refuses to turn over his two male guests (angels in disguise) to the angry mob and, instead, offers his two virgin daughters.  Yet the two angels still viewed Lot as a good man and his family the only family worth saving in the entire town.  A similar story occurred in Judges 19.  The woman was offered to the mob to pro­tect a male guest.  She was raped all night, dying a hor­rible death!  But again, there was no mention of outrage or even moral disap­proval at her having been turned over to the mob in the first place.

This tribal god also had no intention of protect­ing the elderly, the crip­pled, the women and the children in enemy villages. They were all slaughter­ed with no mercy as he ordered (Deut. 2:34, 3:3-7, 7:1-6, 20:16-18).  In the Book of Joshua, his followers killed tens of thousands; they “utter­ly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel command­ed (Joshua 6:21-24; 10:40).”  After the second city fell (with Joshua and his men killing 12,000 men, women and children), Joshua wrote upon stones a copy of the Ten Commandments, including “Thou shalt not kill” (Joshua 8:24-25, 30-32).  The slaughter continued in the books of Judges and Kings with “utterly monstrous blood­baths”.  Over 400 cities were demolished by the Israelites.  The campaign lasted some 170 years.

Of course, when those powerful male leaders opposed to abortion righteously quote the 6th Command­ment they conveniently ignore all of these “God-given excep­tions”.  They also ignore the fact that nowhere in the Bible does it say that God cares about fetuses at all.  He certainly didn’t seem to place much value on them (or babies) when he drowned them all (Genesis 6-7).  And when the Sam­arians rebel­led against this god, he had their preg­nant women “ripped open” and their “little ones dashed to the ground” (Hosea 13:16). Nor did the biblical god seem to care about the innocent fetuses in enemy villages since, as just mentioned, he ordered all the pregnant women to be slaughtered.

 

Charles L. Rulon is an emeritus professor of Life and Health Sciences at Long Beach City College, California.


[i] <www.rcrc.org>

[ii] <www.cath4choice.org>