The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire!

Years ago, when I used to frequent online discussion groups and had no blog, I had a rather interesting experience in a discussion group on atheism. Being open about the fact that I was a Christian, I got a bit of hostility from the other posters, as is to be expected. I did reassure everyone that I was not there to preach unless asked to, as I was sure they received more than enough people wandering through to explain to them the great peril they were in due to the wrath of God, and I probably had little to add to the discussion. I'd come to discuss some other matter that I no longer recall, but in the midst of the hostility that largely died down once I had made my intentions clear, there was one poster to the group that asked me what I thought to be a surprising question.

He thanked me for not wanting to preach, but he asked me in curiosity why it is that so many Christians are so preachy. Really it had never occurred to me that a person in the midst of our western culture might not know the answer to that one. To my surprise (and some amusement), after I had explained it to him, he became angry again. Although I had done nothing to convince him of the truth of Christianity (and indeed, most likely he is still an atheist to this day) he was furious no longer at the audacity of Christians who preach to unbelievers, but instead at the audacity of Christians who do not preach! This was a strange 180-degree turn I'd never seen before, and have not seen since, but on some level, it makes sense.

There's a popular metaphor used by many Christians in response to inquiries about the purpose of preaching the Gospel and proselytizing in general; it may have been the one I used that day. You see, it's like this: Suppose you are walking along in the street and you see someone sitting in the window of a house that's on fire. He clearly has no idea his house is on fire, because he's sitting there complacently reading a book or watching television or what have you. What do you do? Do you try and get his attention and let him know he's in danger, or do you leave him alone, because you don't want to annoy a stranger? Well, most likely you try and let him know that he's in trouble, right?

You wave your arms, you shout, you throw pebbles at the window, until finally, he comes to the window and exasperatedly asks, "What the heck is it you want?!" Upon informing him that his house is burning, rather than gratefully thanking you for your help and running outside, he looks around. He smells no smoke. He sees no flames. He decides you're a lunatic and tells you to go away and stop bothering him. Now you can do that, or you can stay there and shout and insist to him that truly his house is on fire, and he must get out, now! Eventually, you're either going to save the guy's life, or he's going to get really annoyed at you up until the point he burns to death, and then it's too late.

This is a popular metaphor, and indeed, some people do think of it being literally true, but in a spiritual sense. After all, if you're not saved, then supposedly day by day the flames of Hell are creeping closer and closer to you, until the day comes that you will die and they will consume you.

There's a real problem with this metaphor, though. In a practical sense, if you were in a real-life situation similar to the one presented in in the metaphor, you could always in a last resort enter the house, overpower the occupant and drag them out to the street where the flames would be visible. You could call the fire department to come and put out the fire, for that matter. But the metaphor doesn't stretch quite that far.

How do you drag someone out of a metaphorical burning building?

It's a truth, be it fortunate or unfortunate, that you simply can't make someone believe in something. You can show someone evidence, you can plead with them, you can threaten them, but in the end, people believe what they choose to believe.

It's odd, but I actually feel like I understand fanatics who burn down churches or blow up abortion clinics or suicide bomb buses or what have you. Surely there's a feeling that something is so wrong with the world, or at least a particular part of the world, that the only thing to do is to lash out in violence. But if you burn down a church, you're not going to change the personal beliefs of a single member of that church; blow up an abortion clinic, and you're not going to stop a single woman from getting an abortion; get on a bus in Tel Aviv with explosives tied to you and wipe the thing off the face of the earth, and the nation of Israel will continue to exist. In cases like these, violence is not just wrong, it's pointless! But at the same time, I get the sense of desperation that no doubt drives these people to behave in such an irrational fashion. When something is perceived to be wrong with the world, we want to act to make things right.

Yet unfortunately it is exactly in these areas of life where people are driven to extremes that these extremes serve no purpose. You can't force belief on others, you can't force morality. Blow things up, drive people out of physically burning buildings, and still most likely they will stay in the exact same place mentally they have always been. In the end, all you can really do is share your beliefs and pray.

Racing From Elevators

BTW, as a quick side note that I've been meaning to mention, I remembered the other day that the movie Rat Race has an instance of "running from elevators". At a point somewhere around fifteen minutes into the film, most of the main characters are standing in an elevator lobby near the top of a tall building, waiting for the elevator to come up. One by one, they decide in a panic to take the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator to arrive.

Would the congregation please rise...

YORK, Pa. (AP) - September 12, 2007 - A York County judge says a man ordained over the Internet can't perform a legal wedding in Pennsylvania. That's because the Universal Life Church minister doesn't have a congregation that he meets with regularly or a place of worship. The church is planning to challenge the ruling. A church official says accepting some ministers but not others is arbitrary and violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Someone tell me whether I'm allowed to post the whole of an AP story without permission, which I have done here. (If not, I'll remove it, and leave a link instead.) I just had to talk about this one. I'm actually quite surprised that in a web search on this, it was actually so hard to find. In my mind, this is one of the top stories of the week, but then of course, I know that I am obsessed with issues having to do with religion in the culture, so it's probably just me.

It's quite possible that someone reading may not have heard of the Universal Life Church. I don't know how well-known they are, but they're pretty easy to sum up. Essentially, the ULC is a church simply for the sake of being a church. Seriously. They are a church with no tenets or rules whatsoever, and the thing they are best known for is that they will ordain people as ministers if you send them a self-addressed stamped envelope. Actually, I don't think even that much effort is necessary. Nope, it isn't: I just got ordained in less time it took me to cut and paste the article above. Seriously. I'm a freakin' minister now.

Their site features a new option to confess sins online, and to my surprise, a list of ULC congregations, which I did not know to exist. (Perhaps they're just made up? Names of local congregations include "Desert Rainbow Phundamentalists", "Our Divine Coven", and "Church of Drawing".) But enough about the ULC, you could almost read about it on their own site in less time than you could read my own ramblings about it. I've got a point or two I wanted to make about the story.

Okay, so the ULC is a fake church--so to speak. As they themselves point out, legally they are a church in some sort of technical sense that I'm not going to bother to figure out, but anyone who takes a moment or two to familiarize himself with the "church" realizes that it's in essence a bunch of crap. But that does not mean that the ruling of this judge is right.

Let's face it; as I and others have said so rightly before, faith is a very personal thing. What could possibly give the government the right to step in and say that any particular faith is bullshit, even and perhaps especially when it's so very obviously the case? Since when was it required that a minister had to have a group of followers to be a minister? Why is it that you can have a wedding performed by a justice of the peace or the captain of a ship or various other people in specialized positions, but as a "minister", you only qualify if you have followers? (Surely a minister who is performing a wedding has in theory at least two followers, right?)

This news story is possibly a landmark in the history of the separation of church and state, but it occurred to me that there may be an implication here that strikes to the heart of another issue: same-sex marriage. I feel like I've said it here before, but I can't find it in any post so at the risk of repeating myself, let me give you my fantasy resolution to the same-sex marriage issue. A number of the people who oppose same-sex marriage claim that it's a religious issue, and that God ordained it to be so that marriage was to be between one man and one woman. In my mind, if that is so (and I personally believe it myself) then it follows that if the government has no right to meddle in the matter of marriage since it's a religious issue, then they should get right out of the marriage business! Everyone always says to me, "You're nuts, that would never happen!" and I know it's not realistic, but really, I'd like to see not only same-sex marriage banned from ever becoming legal, but I'd like all laws pertaining to the institution of marriage, regardless of the gender(s) of the parties involved, to be simply dissolved.

There came a time about three years into my own marriage where my wife and I had need of a copy of our marriage certificate (I think perhaps it had something to do with Social Security records), and could not find one. We realized that neither of us had ever seen our marriage certificate, and wondered if in fact it existed. My wife was worried about this; I was not. I told her that I had married her by giving a vow to God, not a vow to the government. If the government did not have a piece of paper recording that vow, it mattered very little to me.

Anyway, I find myself wondering if people are using their ULC ordinations to perform same-sex marriages? If not, despite the fact that I said above that I oppose legalization of it, I think people should be. If you really believe that the government has no right to tell you who you can or cannot spend your life with, then why fight? It reminds me of a principle of Buddhism that I have talked about in this blog before, that if the world is an illusion, then there is no point striving against an illusion, simply ignore it and seek enlightenment.

It's a small story, one hardly noticed in the press at all, and yet, there's something potentially profound here. Even though the ULC is not really a religion in any practical sense, it cuts to the heart of the bizarreness of what happens when we try to have a non-religious government that meddles in religion. This may lead to a place where the government is more entwined with religion than ever before, or it may lead to the exact opposite. Who can say, but I'm sure we all can hope, right?

And some of us can become ministers, I suppose...

What's logic got to do with it?

I suppose I spend a lot of my spare time and energy arguing that faith is a good and rational thing. Heck, it's essentially the point of my other blog, if not expressly stated, then at least in fairly obvious subtext. I have a hard time sitting back while I hear people disparage (more or less) faith by describing it as something like "belief in that which has no evidence". I'm sure I've railed on it before, if not here then in countless other venues of public expression. And yet, I'm going to take a moment to say a few things that are a baby step if not a leap in the other direction.

I remember back in my early college days, there came a time when I began to describe myself as a Christian, although in truth, I no longer consider myself to have been one at the time. The stage of personal belief I was at was that I had recently taken the time to read the New Testament for the first time, and I was impressed with what I read. There was definitely something to Christ and his early followers, and I became convinced that Christianity was Truth-with-a-capital-T as one says, and Christians were not (necessarily) idiots following nonsense blindly.

At the same time, I remember an odd moment when I was hanging out with my Christian friends, and I saw something odd. It was one of those things you can't quite explain, you just experience it, and somehow it seems right. One of the young women in my group of Christian friends was looking at another discussing some theological point, and I saw an odd gleam in her eye. At that moment I was surprised and oddly convinced that this woman was completely insane. There was something unsettling and unbalanced in that gleam, and it gave me a thought. Maybe you have to be just a little bit insane to really, truly believe in God. Not to say that belief in God was a delusion of one's insanity, but that God, being the sort of being that He is supposed to be, so totally foreign to our mundane experiences of daily life, somehow causes a sort of mental short circuit when His presence invades our consciousness.

As I write on this, it sounds a bit in the same vein as some of my previous musings on the nature of the soul, and a Christian who followed that and understood it might think I'm talking about some sort of physical analogue to the concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but that's not what I'm talking about at all. I think this sort of short circuit (if indeed that is what it is) happens quite naturally, and to people of all sorts of faith. It's related to the idea espoused above that faith is a belief without evidence, but in this case, it's belief in that which is not completely logical. We live in a natural world, how can we be completely sane and yet accept the existence of the supernatural, in whatever form we might believe in it?

Yet there is a problem coming at this from the side of the skeptics and atheists. I think atheists are quite aware of this, and in reading the above, no doubt they nod their heads and say, "Finally, this Brucker guy is making sense!" There is definitely a belief among such people that there is nothing more illogical than belief in the supernatural. Nonetheless, I would like to say (and finally come to the main point of this writing--aren't essays supposed to start with the point and expand on it instead of building to it? I'm a really crappy writer sometimes...) that this is not what I am saying at all. Despite all I have said here, I still claim that faith is not illogical.

I wish to coin a term here, sort of. It's not in the dictionary, although a search on Google turns up nearly 60,000 hits, so perhaps the idea is not so new. I believe that faith is "nonlogical". In case you don't immediately grasp the term from its own form, consider this: It's logical to believe that 1+1=2. It's illogical to believe that 1+1=3. It's nonlogical to believe that 1+1 is possibly a symbolic representation of a concept such as human relationships. "Nonlogical" is the idea that something might be impossible to arrive at through logical reasoning, yet also there is no logical reasoning that can completely dismiss that something. Faith, love, beauty: these things have a truth-value based not on scientific principles or clear-cut definitions of tangible value, but simply stand on their own.

The fact is, there are statements about the world that are simply true, and other statements about the world that are simply false, but many, many statements about the world are in a gray area in between. That fictional champion of logic, "Star Trek's" Spock once said: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end." Logic can take you far in life, but it was something I realized back in those days and still remember, that in a journey to Truth-with-a-capital-T, there comes a point where logic comes to the end of itself and says, "I can take you no further." Some people get to that point and they let go of logic's hand and walk forward into the darkness. Some people get there and insist that there must simply be nothing more. Still, logic can't really tell you which one is right, can it?

Jagged Little Pill

Rather than reposting the whole discussion--which wasn't long, but why bother--I offer up a link to a post I made on Goosing the Antithesis some time ago. It's a subject that, in a way, I've been thinking about a lot more in the last few weeks, ever since the Skeptic's Annotated Bible actually managed to surprise me. Is the SAB the red pill or the blue pill?

What if reality was not what you thought it to be? In many ways, this is a sticky question most of all on the religious front. Most of us feel we're logically justified in not expecting a "Matrix"-style awakening, and definitely, there is very little reason to think that the wool is being pulled over our eyes to such an extent. Yet at the same time, it's the intangibles of the world that are always on some level very open to questioning. How do you know that your government has anyone's best interests in mind, much less your own? How do you know how the people in your life feel about you, really? How do you know that your brain is functioning right, and you're not insane? And how do you know that your beliefs about god(s) or lack thereof are on the mark?

The thing is, the day I was writing the ASAB blog entry (not the GtA one) I was experiencing a great deal of mixed emotion. I've said it before, and I really mean it, that there are days that I wish the whole Christianity thing was just a bad dream I'd wake up from and find that the universe is somehow simpler. I'm not the sort of person who believes that morality cannot exist apart from God, but definitely in the absence of God, there are numerous moral obligations that completely lose their foundations. In various parts of the Bible, religion is referred to as a "burden" that it would be a shame to saddle someone with unnecessarily, and if the Bible says it, it must be right, eh?

Anyway, the prospect of finding a serious flaw in the Bible was exciting. I've said many a time that while I'm aware of minor glitches in the Bible, the real thing that most Christians worry about is the possibility that there might be a doctrinal error. It's one thing to not know how many chariots Solomon had, it's a whole other issue to not know whether performing a particular action, failing to perform a particular action, or performing a particular action wrong will cause you some sort of torment at the hands of an angry supreme being. So while I would stop short of calling the (potential) problem a serious doctrinal error, the idea that contradictory punishments might be doled out, not just for a crime, but for a rather dubious crime was extremely troubling.

I've always liked Plato's Allegory of the Cave: the idea that we in the world are like people in a cave who only see dark, distorted shadows on a wall when the truth is bright sunlight out side that we didn't even dream of. Plato hypothesized that anyone forced to leave the cave and come out into the sunlight would be essentially traumatized by the change, and might at first fight against it. The fact is, we all believe that our own world-view is correct; that's natural and healthy. Although there might be a better, bigger truth out there, a first glimpse of it might be blinding or painful, and it would inevitably be scary to face the prospect of having to change everything that you know to fit a new set of perceptions.

For myself, the journey into Christianity was like that, and if I should discover it not to be true at some time in the future, the journey out would be similar. Nobody wants to discover that everything they thought made the world what it is is only a lie, even if the world they know is unpleasant. When Morpheus sits before you and offers you those pills, he doesn't give you a glass of water to swallow it with, you've got to choke that thing down, and on the way down it scratches a throat that is straining to reject it.

Maybe you should reject it. Many Christians would tell you that anyone who is trying to lead you away from Christianity is only a servant of Satan in some direct or indirect way. While an atheist isn't likely to appeal to the supernatural, many of them consider evangelistic Christians in the same manner: just charlatans looking to pull the wool over your eyes so you can join the flock and be fleeced along with the rest of the sheep. Whichever position you personally take, it bears contemplating. When I saw The Matrix for the first time, I thought the scene in which Neo is offered the two pills was incredibly creepy. Imagine yourself in a strange house you've never been to before with a bunch of freaky people you just met that day, and one of them says, "Hey, if you take this pill, you're going to see some wild stuff!" My personal response would be, "Uh, thanks, but I tried that stuff in college, and I think I'm pretty much done with it, okay?"

Of course, as I mentioned in the notes of the original post, there was a similar scene in the movie Total Recall in which the hero of the story is also offered a pill that will supposedly make the fantasy world around him disappear. He rejects the pill, and although the ending of the movie is left with a touch of vagueness, we are generally led to believe that rejection was the right choice, and the pill was a deception. In a less philosophical (and cinematic) vein, some people believe that when they take LSD, they are having some sort of supernatural experience of expanded consciousness, while others simply believe that the chemicals in their brain are being made to fire randomly, and it's all garbage. Who in the end is to say whether an atheist or a theist is the one who is having a "bad trip"? Each is convinced in their own mind that they are seeing the true reality.

The funny thing is, it's like you're sitting there with Morpheus, he holds out the pills and says his little speech, and as you reach for the pill, someone chimes up, saying, "Wait a minute, I think you've got it backwards. I'm pretty sure it's the blue pill that makes you wake up from the dream." On a side note, something I've always wondered is what would have happened if Neo had taken both pills? (Edit to add: Apparently, I'm not the only one to muse on this.) Of course, the pills being essentially a metaphor even in the original story, I think the whole thing breaks down at that point. The only reasonable alternative to taking one pill or the other is to take neither and just walk away. (I suppose in my metaphorical take, that would be like agnosticism.) In the real-world scenario, I think that's the choice I would take.

But not too many of us find ourself sitting in a room with a mysterious man offering us two pills that represent radically diverging life-paths. Most of us live a very mundane life. Still, those choices are offered to us nonetheless. "I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't take the red pill," says one commenter on the old post, and yet every day, so many people turn their back on the possibility of knowing the truth, certain (metaphorically) that the blue pill is all the reality they need. This is not a criticism of atheism; this is a criticism of closed-mindedness. Whatever it is that you believe, you should know and accept the possibility that you might be wrong, as logical and well-founded as your beliefs may seem.

Protesting protestantism

There's something I love about irony.

If you ask an evangelical protestant Christian why they are not Catholic, they'll probably have a short list of things that they perceive as being somehow wrong with the Catholic Church. Now, I don't have a source for much of what I'm going to say here, only personal experience from having now lived a fair portion of my life among Protestants, you'll just have to take my word for it if you're not in the same sorts of social circles in which I tend to find myself.

What's wrong with the Catholic Church? Well, it tends to boil down to authority. Maybe it's an American thing, since the U.S. is a country that was largely founded on the rejection of supposed divine authority, but there is this feeling that it is clearly wrong to have a person (a.k.a. The Pope, or maybe your local priest) who tells you what to think when it comes to spiritual matters. The Church (I'll henceforth use a capital "C" when referring to the Catholic Church) apparently has all these rules that you have to follow. The Bible has a specific meaning that the Church teaches; worship is done in a style that the Church dictates; communion, baptism and various other rituals are carried out with a specified liturgy the Church prescribes; etc. Sure, there are other issues, but aside from a few deeper theological issues that most people don't really fully understand anyway, most of it boils down to the fact that rather than a free church in which we all are equals and exist on the same level, the Church has this complicated hierarchy of authority figures that dictate every aspect of your faith life.

The irony in this all is that in the end, most of our evangelical protestant churches have discarded this sort of structured hierarchy in return for a hidden, more vaguely-defined one. Even early on in my experience as a Christian, the first church I ever attended had special meetings to welcome newcomers into their congregation. I actually remember very little about those classes except for one thing that I thought odd at the time. The pastor who was running the class repeatedly informed us, in an odd manner that seemed proudly sly, that "At this church..." (subtle dramatic pause) "...we don't wear ties!" Apparently having grown up in a much more formal church, this guy was very interested in this fact, and seemed to be sure that everyone else would be as well. Big whoop, right?

Yet, there was something about this that in a way he never admitted, perhaps least of all to himself, was indeed a big deal. At the time, I always suspected that the fact that he even brought it up implied that it was a big deal to him. I thought, "You know, I wonder if he'd prefer to wear a tie anyway?" Maybe that's it, and maybe it's one of the smallest examples of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Sure, he doesn't have to wear a tie, but I suspect that although it's not written down anywhere, it is the case that he is not allowed to wear a tie. Not that this is solely a church thing; I've worked in offices with relaxed dress policies, and people tend to give you dirty looks if you show up wearing a tie.

But the institutionalization doesn't stop with an unstated dress code, people talk about how more traditional churches have rituals and liturgy, and sing old traditional songs. At our church, we have once again our own unstated liturgical service, and it's one that's similar to every evangelical church I've attended in my dozen or so years as a Christian.

At the appointed time for church to start, the worship leader will get up on the stage with the band, take his guitar and welcome everyone to church. He will welcome everyone to stand, which is not expressly required, but everyone with the exception of a few elderly people and those in wheelchairs will do so. Most people will show up five to ten minutes later, perhaps as much as twenty minutes if they have children. Around this time, the band will pause and an associate pastor or perhaps a deacon will walk onto the stage. He will welcome everyone again, compliment the band, and invite everyone to sit down. A short speech will be given about upcoming events, the need for more volunteers in children's ministry, and an admonition to visitors not to give money for the offering, but merely fill out a visitor card and drop it on the bag. He says a short prayer, and the band plays a song while the ushers pass the offering bags around. Everyone is asked to stand again, one more song is played, the worship leader asks everyone to shake hands with their neighbor, and everyone sits down as the senior pastor takes the stage and the band exits. The sermon opens with a bad joke or perhaps a humorous movie clip on the screen. Everyone pulls out their sermon notes, which consist of three bullet points with a missing word or phrase to fill in. After about forty-five minutes of talking, the pastor apologizes for his sermon being "so long", wraps it up and excuses everyone. People with children pick them up; every child has a craft project in a white paper sack with a Bible verse sticker on it. People mill about on the patio eating donuts if it's an a.m. service, cookies if it's p.m., and either way there is also coffee, juice and water.

Deviate from the above in any way, and the congregation will freak out. I had a pastor whose wife was a ballet instructor, and at one service, during the music phase, some dancers came out on stage and did a little routine. In principle, there's nothing wrong with this, but departing from routine was bizarre, and a few people got up and left.

Now, there's nothing wrong with routine actually. Like I said above, these things happen in the secular world, too. What about the deeper issues of theology? Surely those are the real vital ones, right? In the Church, if the Pope says things are a certain way, then that's the way they are, and supposedly, that's bad to have a single person driving and defining faith for a large group of other people.

First of all, it has to be understood, as I myself did not understand until a few years ago, that the Pope's every word is not somehow law on par with scripture. At times, the Pope does choose to speak with such authority, but most of the time, he's a lot like a senior pastor of a worldwide church, simply being there to guide and teach like any Protestant pastor would do.

Second of all, who says our little local churches are so different? When my pastor stands up at the lectern on a Sunday morning and says "Jesus is trying to say such-and-such through this passage of scripture," is it at all appropriate or acceptable for me to stand up at my seat in the congregation and say, "Excuse me, but I disagree with your interpretation?" Of course not (in general: as I have mentioned elsewhere, my church does a yearly "open mike" service where anyone can ask the pastor any question they want), that would be incredibly out of the norm; the church would sooner stop serving coffee on the patio!

Lastly, there are a few things to be said about this. Most churches, including my own, have a "statement of faith" which is a document which outlines our theological position. Anyone who wants to join the church has to read the document and sign a statement saying that they agree with it and will not oppose it within the church. While it may seem to some to be a shade totalitarian, it makes sense that you would have such an instrument to foster unity in the church. If you don't agree with it before you join, why would you want to join? If you come to an understanding that disagrees with it after joining, why would you want to stay? At the same time, if you have a question about an issue, there is no rule against discussing it with a pastor or fellow member of the congregation, only against actively opposing it from within the church.

Many things that I have said here in my blog would shock numerous people at my church, (many drop their jaw at the mention that I'm a registered Democrat, which I think is the least of my issues) although I don't keep the existence of this blog a secret; I don't think anyone from my church reads it. If I were to say some of the things I have said in this blog at any sort of official church meeting, I think it's possible I might lose my membership, I'm not sure, but I think it would be fair, actually. Still, I have the right to say whatever I want outside of church, and the thing of it is, that doesn't make me any different from Catholics. In truth, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Catholic that has complete and undying devotion to the Pope; most I have met admire and respect him, but also have occasional issues on which they respectfully disagree with him.

Is the pastor of a church just a little Pope? Sure, we Protestants recognize that the pastorate and the laity are two categories of people between whom God makes no strong distinction. At the church picnic, he's just another guy you josh around with, chat about work, play frisbee with, etc. But on Sunday morning, he's the one standing on the stage, telling everyone what the Bible means, and while you may share the same theological position as he does, you're not going to take his place on the stage Sunday morning as easily as you took his place in line for the hot dogs Saturday afternoon. While the board of elders (or whatever) can have him replaced if necessary, in a very real way, while he is in office, the pastor is the church.

Thumbing my nose at Stephen Jay Gould

(Note: This blog entry has prerequisite reading, a short essay to be found here.)

My grandmother used to have a peculiar habit of collecting rocks. Collecting rocks in itself is not weird, most people have done it at one time or another, but most people do it because the rocks they collect have either a certain physical beauty or perhaps they came from a place that has sentimental value to them. My grandmother collected rocks because she wanted to be an archaeologist.

The place where I grew up was considered by many archaeologists to be a veritable treasure trove of artifacts, having been populated for centuries by numerous cultures. An interesting history there, actually; the Pomo tribe was in many ways like the financial center of the ancient California economy. They had a technology that as far as I know is still a secret to this day that enabled them to make stone drill bits they used in the manufacture of beads from seashells. These beads were used as a local currency because there was a limited supply of them made under strict secrecy and control of the Pomo. When Europeans finally made it to the West Coast, they brought with them the technology to make drill bits out of metal, and the economic system collapsed virtually overnight as everyone freely made counterfeit beads.

My grandmother's interest as an amateur archaeologist was, unfortunately, lacking in any sort of scientific rigor. Her back porch was often littered with various stones she had collected on her walks along a nearby creek, and when asked why she had chosen the stones she had, there were two stock answers.

1. "I think these are man-made because I see so many rocks just like them all over the place."
2. "I think this rock was man-made because I've never seen another rock like it anywhere."

I think anyone could see the problem with this logic. Aside from the obvious contradiction, the fact is that real artifacts will probably fall somewhere in between on the commonality spectrum, but in the end, the real issue is that relative rarity of an object is not something that's truly a factor in how likely it is to be man-made. (Those stone drill bits I mentioned are undoubtedly man-made, but are extremely rare, while old rusty nails, which are also undoubtedly man-made, are very easy to find when digging around in the dirt in that area.)

For those of you that read the essay I linked to, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with evolution, or maybe you see it as a transparent attempt to switch the topic to Intelligent Design. Well, ID is definitely going to come up in some form in this post, but I have a message for people on both sides of the evolutionary debate. In his essay, Stephen Jay Gould mentions

"I had always learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success."

I myself had never been taught this, but perhaps I was biased growing up with a cat that had opposable thumbs. I think what Gould is hinting at here is that anti-evolutionists are looking at the thumb of humans and saying essentially, "The thumb as we know it in humans is extremely rare in other animals, therefore surely we must have been designed." Uniqueness is indeed often touted as a basis for assuming intelligent design, usually, of course, as a list of things that are unique to humans in particular. Something that I have been noticing lately after reading a great deal about the platypus is that uniqueness is a surprisingly common thing. Every animal has something that sets it apart from other animals, or it would be the same animal, wouldn't it? And while the platypus is indeed very odd, odd animals exist everywhere. (I think on this continent, our "odd animal" is the hummingbird, but I'm sure there are other freaks of nature.) Anyway, the oddly unique qualities that are possessed by homo sapiens are really a non-issue to evolutionary biologists, and from a purely scientific standpoint, they shouldn't be, really.

The thing that I really find fascinating about this essay is that Gould (a man who, if Darwinism were a religion as some of my fellow fundamentalists seem to think, would have been one of its archbishops if not the Pope) seems to agree with some of the views that creationists and ID proponents espouse today. While most skeptics insist that the idea of a creator who designed life is preposterous and need not even be addressed as a possibility, Gould gives a nod to the concept:

"[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator."

Certainly Gould never admits the idea of a creator as a likely possibility, and in fact the whole point of the essay is to argue fiercely against the concept, but he does address the concept in order to make a reasoned argument against it, something few evolutionists even bother to do, it seems to me.

For those anti-evolutionists who may be reading this, I would say to you that if you actually read Gould's essay and it didn't give you pause, I think you're either being intellectually dishonest or you didn't understand his point. I think a big part of what makes his argument so strong is that he does take time to consider the possibilities presented by the hypothesized existence of an intelligent creator of the panda. In seeing both sides, at least in some limited degree, he's creating a case that is much more well-rounded than most I've heard. Creationists could and should take a tip from Gould. While I've been railing a bit in my last paragraph about evolutionists failing to address the opposition, I don't want to give the impression that I think creationists are any better on average in that respect. No ground is going to be gained for the cause of promoting creationism or ID by ignoring the other side. Evolution has a lot of evidence and many solid arguments behind it, and while, yes, it does seem highly unlikely that somehow billions of years of random chance caused inert matter to somehow coalesce and eventually morph into modern humans, simply saying that it's dubious is hardly an argument in itself.

Gould's argument is pretty straightforward, but needs an essay several pages long to explain the backdrop of the real meat of the argument; delving into the general morphology of the order carnivora, comparing pandas to bears and other relatives, explaining the mechanism of the human thumb vs. the panda thumb all lead up to a basis for putting it all together into a simple premise.

"The radial thumb is...a contraption, not a lovely contrivance."

Gould is assuming that an omnipotent creator would either give the panda the same thumb he gave other animals (especially since all the parts are there to do so), or he would build an entirely new type of thumb from entirely new body parts that simply do not exist in other species. There's logic in this, no doubt. The panda's thumb is essentially a thumb that is designed the hard way, so to speak, when at least one more elegant solution to the construction problem exists, and one might suppose other elegant solutions could be made. (If you were a mechanical engineer, you probably could think of one or two easily, I imagine.)

One of the things about this argument that I find interesting is that, aside from acknowledging the possibility of a creator, it also runs counter to what I've heard from other atheists. Often those who promote the idea of evolution over creationism will point to the similarities between creatures and say that those similarities indicate common ancestry. Gould seems to be implicitly confirming what many creationists will say in response to such an argument: that common design implies a common designer. After all, why should God re-create the thumb for humans when a perfectly good thumb already exists in other primates? It's that very argument that creationists love to use (and the average evolutionist pooh-poohs) that is the very basis for Gould's argument here. Why shouldn't God use a pre-existing design, or, if there was a good reason not to, why wouldn't God make something new rather than cobble together a thumb from second-hand parts, so to speak.

When I was a kid, I got some Legos in a McDonald's Happy Meal. The small collection of Legos was designed to make something specific, like a little racecar. Now, I could make that racecar, sure, but the real fun was in making something new and unexpected out of those parts. Could I position the wheels closer together so that they functioned like gears? Could I make a car that bore little or no resemblance to the intended car design? If I really wanted to get creative, I could have asked my parents to buy me more Legos, but tinkering was fun and stimulating. Is it a sure thing that God would not also think so? As I could think of my attempts to combine the same set of Legos in different ways a way of showing my creativity, could not God also wish to show His creative side by combining the same set of bones, muscles and tendons in varying and surprising ways? Is nature's variety God's way of showing us that there's more than one way to skin a cat?

While I do think that Gould's argument is very strong (and has resulted in my wanting to read some of Darwin's books, particularly the one on orchids, which must be a blast), what's really missing in the story here to truly address the concerns of a theist is more info on the theological side. While Gould takes time to unpack all the baggage of ursine bone structure, when it comes to dealing with the question of creationism, he simply assumes the proper action of an omnipotent creator.

"If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes."

So many arguments against the existence of God boil down to this sentence with different phrases inserted in the underlined spaces. "If God was really good, surely he would have spared my mother Alzheimer's." "If God didn't want me to have sex with whomever I want whenever I want, surely he would not make it feel so darn good." "If God wanted me to believe in him, surely he would give me a million dollars." In short, assume you know what God would do or how he would think, and base your beliefs around that assumption.

The fact is, maybe Gould is right. I mean, it sounds reasonable. However, there are a lot of things that sound reasonable, but aren't necessarily so. "Humans are designed in a manner so high above the other animals in dexterity, intelligence and other factors that surely we are the apex of creation." That's something that sounds quite reasonable to most people, but evolutionary biology shows that this is not the case at all, or at least it doesn't follow in direct logical progression.

You know what I think? I think there are (at least) two things in the universe that are simply beyond our ability to fully comprehend. One of them is the full story of the origin of life as we currently know it, and the other is the mind of God. Maybe instead of fighting over who has come closer to arriving at unattainable knowledge, we could just enjoy the journey? Probably not likely, but that's my personal plan.