Continue reading »]]> “The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá

May 14, 2012. Evolution is one of the most successful of the modern sciences. Not only does it enjoy wide-ranging empirical evidence for its basic tenets and provide support for a multitude of disciplines, practices, and applications, but it is also extraordinarily rich in the scope and extent to which it offers broad and powerful ways of thinking about reality.

But lets talk about chance.

Chance comes into play in evolution as a mechanism that creates random gene variations that are accepted or rejected by natural selection.

The role of chance in evolution has engaged more than several thinkers as they contemplate evolution’s broader implications. Among them was Jacques Monod, the gifted French biologist and Nobel Prize winner who viewed the role of chance as centrally important to our understanding of the universe. His view was that:

Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.

In Chance and Necessity, his widely read philosophical magnum opus, he summarizes his views in the book’s last chapter. Humans are the product of the natural selection processes of evolution driven by chance – by accidental events:

We call these events accidental; we say that they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modification in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.

Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact

Stephen J. Gould, one of our greatest evolutionary scientists, thought in a similar vein. That we exist is accidental, he argued. It is the result of blind forces and contingency. If our world were to start all over from the beginning, we would get entirely different results because of the vagaries of chance:

Wind back the tape of life to the origin of the modern multicellular animals in the Cambrian explosion, let the tape play again from this identical starting point, and the replay will populate the earth … with a radically different set of creatures. The chance that this alternative set will contain anything remotely like a human being must be effectively nil, while the probability of any kind of creature endowed with self-consciousness must also be extremely small.

Michael Ruse, a philosophy professor and a prolific writer who has weighed in on all things relating to evolution, agrees with Gould. He warmed to his topic when Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2011 Easter homily that:

If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason.

Chastising the Pope (Huff Post, 5/11/2011), he described him as misguided because he wasn’t following the accepted views in evolution:

Human evolution had no more forethought than, say, the pattern that a pile of sand makes when emptied from a bucket. … Evolution depends on mutations that simply don’t have direction. … To put direction into evolution is to be a supporter of the non-scientific theory of Intelligent Design. … there is a flat-out contradiction between the claims of modern biological science and the theology of the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, this is fairly extraordinary set of claims, given that we exist and presumably have arrived here by a process that is at least related to the claims of modern biological sciences. (At least there was enough of a sense of direction to get us here!) But beside that, it is a theological statement to the effect that evolution doesn’t have a direction. AND it contains a major scientific faux pas - a mistaken statement to the effect that randomness (i.e., random mutations as a driving force) rules out direction as a result of natural selection processes. Yet, remarkably, Ruse’s view is representative of that of many major thinkers in evolutionary thought.

So, something funny is going on here, and we need to understand it.

As far as I can tell, Monod, Gould, and Ruse are making broad, sweeping generalizations about the nature of the world on the basis of understandings of the mechanisms of evolution that rely on popular and antiquated concepts of randomness rather than relying on modern understandings – what physicists call stochastic processes or the behavior of complex systems – that have developed since Darwin’s time. Either that, or they are following the prevailing winds of intellectual fashion.

But before we explore the science of the various roles played by chance and random processes – roles that physicists have explored in exhausting detail in such varied arenas as thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, complexity theory, information theory, and even stellar evolution – lets look at the social and historical backdrop of the interpretations of chance presented by Monod, Gould, and Ruse.

Evolution as the Modern Creation Story

Evolution, in many ways, is the modern creation story – a scientific updating of the ancient creation myths of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Israel and of the great religious and philosophical traditions that are such an important part of our heritage. So it should be no surprise that there have been numerous attempts – some more successful than others – to harness evolution to various philosophical or ideological perspectives.

Nor, given the extent to which modern scientists have viewed scientific understanding as obviating the need for theology, should we be surprised to see evolution bandied about as if it were a quasi-religion (as the British philosopher Mary Midgley has described in Evolution as a Religion, the Zygon article of the same title, and a number of other publications). The modern American creationism movement, the intelligent design movement, and the growing worldwide distrust of evolutionary science (a poll cited in Wikipedia shows that the number of American who reject evolution has increased from 55% to 60% from 1985 to 2005) are likely a reaction to this bandying about.

So, the role of evolution in modern society is not only that of a science, but also that of a system of thought which views itself as the modern enlightened replacement for the creation stories of Biblical belief. And given the great breadth of its powers of explanation – powers that unify an astonishingly large number of biological (and increasingly, social) phenomena – it is easy to see why people feel justified in seeing it as such. Evolution – like the book of Genesis – is a very powerful creation narrative.

The Pleasures of Omnicompetence

Midgely, in The Myths We Live By sees the sense of power and authority that many ascribe to evolution as due to the myth of scientific “omnicompetence.” This myth, an inheritance from the Enlightenment, views science “as able to answer every kind of question. And that naturally must include questions about value.”

She quotes Nehru from his address to the Indian National Institute of Science in 1960:

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people … The futures belongs to science and to those who make friends with science.

The Bhopal Disaster

She then notes:

The interesting thing here is not just Nehru’s confidence but what he meant by science … He meant a whole new ideology, a moral approach that would justify using those facts to change society in a quite particular way.

Is Nehru intending to rely on science alone, Midgely asks?

Aren’t you also going to need good laws. effective administrators, honest and intelligent politicians, good new customs to replace the old ones, perhaps even a sensitive understanding of the traditions that you mean to sweep away? … [Of course he knows this, but he] includes in ‘science’ the whole world view which he takes to lie behind it, namely, the decent, humane, liberal attitude out of which it has actually grown. … He expects that the scientific spirit will include in it wise and benevolent use of those discoveries.

But this is the myth of the “omnicompetence” of science, not the reality. The reality of science includes nuclear warfare, the Bhopal disaster, environmental pollution, global warming, profiteering, worldwide economic collapse and the “wholesale waste of resources on gadgetry” in addition to the good things that science can provide.

What does this mean for chance, randomness, and the interpretations of evolution we described above?

My answer is that it means that Monod, Gould, and Ruse are doing their very best to tell the world about their convictions about what is right and what is scientific – the two being synonymous in their minds. They not only believed that doing good science is important – both Monod’s work and the less embarrassing of his philosophical speculations are still of great interest – but they also believe in the Enlightenment worldview which science, in their view, encompasses and entails.

We now read Monod’s comments on the meaningless of life – and its emotional call to find meaning in science – as an almost comical exaggeration of the French existential philosophical viewpoint of the 50s, as most certainly it was. And Gould? Without a doubt, he was a warrior, fighting the good and holy fight against fundamentalism and intolerance of all kinds, the belief in progress among them. And Ruse? Maybe he is just fighting Catholicism.

The problem, of course, is that science doesn’t bestow on its followers righteousness and automatically correct views – it is agnostic, a double-edged sword in this regards.The Enlightenment view of science that Midgely describes accompanied science, rather than being caused by it. If science is to be as Nehru wanted it to be -  the pursuit of truth and the implementation of it in benevolent ways – then it needs something like the principles of the Baha’i Faith to accompany it. Otherwise, like Monod, Gould, and Ruse, it will simply bend to breezes and vagaries of the time.

Next Week

Next week, I will discuss random processes and complex system, making them intelligible and relating them to ideas of chance in evolution.

…………………………

This is the 14th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá

May 7, 2012. We have been examining what science says about whether or not we are animals.

It is perhaps the most important questions – it certainly is the most polarizing – in the science and religion discussion. And it is the root cause of the debates about – and the intense opposition to – evolution.

Other questions – does God exists, do we have souls, is there life after death, what is the purpose of life – were once thought to be amenable to scientific explanation. But for these it is increasingly clear that science – at least in its current stage of development – has little to say of relevance.

The question of whether or not we are animals, however, seems to be a question where science does have an important and legitimate role in providing answers.

Are We Or Are We Not Animals: The Status Quo Answer

“Are humans animals?” Do a Google search on this question and the first thing that comes up – meaning roughly that it is the most linked answer and the one likely to be first accessed – is this one on the Wiki Answer’s site:

Yes, humans are animals. The human’s phylum is Chordata (vertebrate). The human’s class is mammalia. It’s order is primate (the same as apes). It’s family is Hominidae (apes that have no tail and can gather food with their hands.) The Human’s sub-family is Homininae. It’s tribe is Hominini. It’s genus is Homo and it’s specie is scientifically named Homo Sapiens.

There is no indication that there any serious questions about the issue – no discussion of the non-scientific arbitrariness of defining humans entirely by reductionist biological considerations, no mention of any modern neurological, paleontological, sociobiological, economical, sociological, behavioral, or philosophical studies of the uniqueness of human, no mention at all that the answer is contested. With the exception of the Wikipedia Site “Human“, all the other references at the top of the search are of the same ilk: “La ti dah, humans are animals!”

If you have any questions why modern religious Americans – especially those with enough sophistication to question potted answers – are suspicious of – and doubtful about – aspects of modern science that address human origins, this should answer them.

Think about it. Amazingly, a question about our nature – a question often posed at a high degree of sophistication, a question that addresses our purpose in life and the nature of our humanity – is answered in an embarrassing, unsophisticated low-brow way that not only ignores the relevant issues involved, but ignores the scientific subtleties.

And it is easy to see why a young high-school student – or anyone who unquestionably accepts supposed scientific authority – would assume that the answer was a genuine one, imprinted with scientific authority and its aura.

The Wikipedia site on Humans, it should be pointed out, is quite different. It provides a wealth of helpful access to materials on numerous different fields of human studies and exemplifies why encyclopedias like the Britannica are no longer around. And, it studiously avoids confrontational claims about humans as animals. It even usefully points out that the word “human”, which I’ve been carefully to use to avoid the older sexist term “man,” derives from the Latin hūmānus, the adjective form of homō or “man”.

But, then on a side bar. after being vanquished, our old bumbling, inarticulate friend makes its reappearance. We belong – the sidebar usefully informs us – to the kingdom of animalia. And then – to make things worse – it informs us that this is the “scientific” classification. Actually, it is not, it is the biological classification.

The Problem with the Current Answers

So the answer that science provides to our question is a twofold one. On one hand science proclaims that humans are animals for reasons biological (and historical). On the other hand, science contains multitudinous studies that show clearly that humans are quite different than animals. Thia twofold answer is garbled, self-contradicting, and confusing. Or it would be if both sides were presented to the public, which mainly they aren’t.

The part of science which claims that we are animals is particularly problematic. It not only contradicts our direct experience, but also the contradicts the great teachings of the world’s major religions and its major philosophies. It even contradicts the fundamental precepts of science itself in so far as science is based on the validity of rational and logical intellectual processes – something unique to humans.

This simplistic answer is really an answer to a biological question – and only an answer to a biological question. But it is more than often construed both by those asking it – and often by those answering it – on a much broader basis. In the broader sense, it is a question about who we are. And the biological answer doesn’t – and can’t – answer it.

The consequences of this mix-up of answers and questions are manifold – ranging from the wide-spread belief that science proves that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of liberty, happiness, and the satisfaction of our animal desires, to mechanistic human and healing sciences can ignore human reality or consider it as of no import, to the growing conviction that the evolutionary sciences are cynically manipulative attempts to impose an anti-religious agenda in the false guise of science. None of these are true.

So, we have to ask the questions: On what basis – and on whose authority – does science validate the claim to offer the definitive answer to our question?

And who decides that the scientific, philosophical, and religious grounds for contesting the 18th century answer can be ignored?

The Future Role of Science in Addressing the Question of Whether or Not We Are Humans

Here is my conclusion: The idea that man is an animal is an arbitrary 18th century viewpoint based on the simple-minded assumptions that (1) a thing is what it is constructed from, (2) that a thing is what it was originally, and (3), that only simple material things are real.

While those assumptions – derived in great part from the extraordinary success of 18th century Newtonian physics – were revolutionary, challenging, and fruitful in numerous ways in their time (and still are in many circumstances) – they fall far short in light of modern empirically-based, systems-based, interaction-based, information-oriented, complexity-oriented studies that distinguish between behavior of parts and behaviors of the whole.

If my conclusion is correct – and it appears to be – what is it that science can do?

Here is a proposal. What science can do – and can provide – is the following:

1. A clear set of criteria by which we can distinguish whether or not humans are unique.
2. A clear description of the experiments that can be done to provide the relevant data for deciding whether humans are unique.
3. A forum and sets of discussions that allows exchange of ideas about what the uniqueness criteria should be and whether or not the criteria have been met.
4. Informed discussion of whether a proposed criteria is scientific or not.
5. Studies of the usefulness of past, current, and future definitions of human uniqueness in science

Of course, there are a number of other things to be added to the list.

Exploring what science cannot do is equally important. Science cannot:

1. Impose its own categories. Science can show where there are clear distinctions – where human behavior departs significantly from animal behavior – but it cannot force doubters to conclude that humans are or are not to be classified as part of the animal kingdom.
2. Science cannot provide resolution – at least at its current stage of development – of very complex, high level phenomena like intelligence, human social organization, motivation, human purpose, etc. So it cannot answer high level metaphysical questions – the purpose of life, etc. – in anything like a meaningful way.
3. Science by itself cannot impose meaning. It cannot tell us a whether a particular arbitrary definition of some category or another is meaningful in an ultimate metaphysical sense, although it can tell us whether people think it is meaningful. Recognizing this would go a long way towards rescuing science from religious pretensions.

And these ideas are just for starters. Obviously those who care about science can try to stop it from spreading misinformation – as it is doing now – about the nature of humans.

Next Week

This time, I really am going to stop on the topic of whether or not we are animals. But obviously, I have to come back to it later given how important it is.

Next time, I will discuss a different aspect of evolution, science, and religion – randomness and the idea that it rules out God as a creator. For a quantum physicist such as myself, this is an area in biology where my experience in doing statistical physics gives me an advantage.

…………………………

This is the 13th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 30, 2012. Today’s blog again examines the question of whether or not we are animals. The topic, I’m thinking, is so important that we have to give it its full due.

Almost all other conflicts in science and religion are readily resolvable – either there never should have been a conflict in the first place, or they are due to prejudice, ignorance, and superstition in religious or anti-religious communities, or they are due to political conflict over power and cultural authority.

But the topic of whether or not we are animals goes to the heart of who we are and how we should act in this world and embodies the impasse between secularism and religiosity on many, many issues. Break the impasse, and many of the conflicts between science and religion – on evolution, on climate warming, on distrust of secularism – either go away or are reduced in intensity. This is how I’m thinking at the moment.

Is it Important Whether or Not We Differentiate Humans from Animals?

In one sense, it makes no difference about what we call ourselves. We are what we are regardless of labels. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter whether we are animals or not.

Another point of view is that names and labels are important. Regardless of whether we are animals or not, we are most definitely symbol-using and thinking-using beings, and words matter. They are important as encapsulating beliefs about who we are, and are central to our self-image and the goals we pursue.

This is the view I’m tending towards. There are various implications:

• If we think that we are animals, then we will look to satisfying our “animal” needs as the purpose of our life.
• Or, if we recognize that we are not animals, then we will focus on human pursuits – doing what is right and good, rational thinking, doing science, cultivating ourselves, helping our human brethren, and of course, saving the animals.

Perhaps, if we think that we are animals, then we will recognize our kinship with the rest of the denizens of earth and do a better job of protecting the other animals, rather than eliminating or industrializing them. But of course, we can do that if we think of ourselves as humans.

Or maybe we can do all the good things listed above and still think of ourselves as animals, but as “human” animals.

But then there are complications. Some people take ideas from science so seriously that they imbue them with the same aura of divine truth that formerly were attributed to religious teachings. And, they get angry if you suggest that humans are different than animals. Or they spin vast webs of thought – communism, war, theories of racial supremacy – inspired by thoughts about our animal nature. If humans are animals but human animals, why not accord them the honor of their own name?

Why We Think We Are Animals – The Arguments and the Counter Arguments

On this most contentious of topics, it is hard to consider all the nuances – and the the ins and outs of the various arguments – connected to the topic of whether or not we are animals. But lets give it a a brief try.

The view that humans are animals is based on (at least) four assumptions.

1. The Biological Assumption

The assumption is that if humans are biologically the same as animals – as they most clearly are – then they are animals. Considerations other than biology don’t enter into it.

The obvious counterargument is that we are not simply just biological entities. We cannot simply be reduced to our biological substratum. Behind this assumption is a reductionist argument which holds that we are is nothing more than the sum total of our parts – an argument which is belied by nearly universal experience. As a result, arguments based on the idea of emergence – the view that most phenomena cannot be explained by simply considering the nature of the parts of a system – are increasingly used to describe complicated and complex systems. Scientists such E. O. Wilson, Michael Gazzaniga, and Ian Tattersal characterize human nature as distinct and different than our biological substratum, in keeping with emergence.

2. The Non-Uniqueness Assumption

This assumption is that if human capabilities – mental qualities and the like – are found in nascent form in non-human animals – as they most clearly are – then we can’t differentiate between human and non-humans.

This is how Darwin viewed things, as we have discussed. Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), the Swedish botanist who coined the term Homo sapiens and whose successful decree that man is an animal is where the controversy started, had a similar point of view. Famously, he wrote:

Theology decree that man has a soul and that the animals are mere ‘automata mechanica,’ but I believe they would be better advised that animals have a soul and that the difference is of nobility.

But there are very serious problems with these views, in that they deny the obvious. Clearly the fruit of man’s activities are altogether of a different order than the fruit of animal activities (think cities, cultures, science, even desertification). Also, these views propose a criteria for differentiating man and animal – mental qualities and the like – but claim that the amount or extent of those qualities is immaterial. It is like claiming that Death Valley and the Amazon rain-forest do not differ because they both possess plant life.

3. Political Assumptions

Behind the scenes, not recognized by many historical actors in the drama and still largely hidden, are underlying political and cultural assumptions.

The view that man is an animal is inherent in social contract theory, the political philosophy that underlies modern European-inspired forms of government and social organization. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – who put social contract theory on the map – argued that humans are like mechanical entities (i.e., closely equivalent to out-of-control animals) in their natural state and that life without a powerful ruler was, therefore, “nasty, brutish, and short”. Subsequent arguments – for example, those of Locke – refined and restated Hobbes’ ideas, but retained their grounding in assumptions about human nature that conflicted with traditional religious points of view (for example, the so-called Divine Right of Kings).

The American Constitution embodies the social contract perspective, stating that all humans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is a distinctly different view about the ends of our endeavors than that presented by religion and illustrates the extent to which political philosophy had, in effect, set in place working definitions of human nature that defined us as like animals.

4. Cultural Assumptions

Also, there European cultural assumption that bear strongly on how Linneaus and Darwin – both privileged with traditional educations – came to see things. Their views about human nature owe a strong debt to European philosophy, European history, and especially to Christian theology.

I’ll leave the details to a later time, but a strong and central component of European thought was – and is – its preoccupation with theories of origins and creation. This likely is mainly due to the dominance of Christianity for a millienia and a half – especially the influence of the biblical creation myth as outlined in the ancient Jewish book of Genesis, but it was also due to the memories – half buried – of ancient Roman civilization and the remnants of that civilization in the Catholic church and its political counterparts.

Central to this European point of view is a perspective that strongly holds that what things are is determined by their origins: in principio veritas (in the beginnings is the truth).

A fascinating description of this, albeit as it appears in scholastic Latin grammar, is found in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric – a new study of the use of Latin in medieval Europe. The book review in the London Review of Books puts it this way:

Medieval habits of thought can bewilder moderns, a case in point being the passion for etymology as a way to organise knowledge. Isidore of Seville entitled his vast seventh-century encyclopedia Etymologies, or Origins; its influence was incalculable. … Not so distant is the belief underlying genuine historical linguistics, a creation of the 19th century. Like its sibling disciplines of the same era (history of religions, comparative mythology, folklore studies), it posits that, to learn the deepest meaning of such phenomena, one must trace them back to their most ancient historical roots. In principio veritas.

What this means for ideas about the nature of man is that the perspectives of evolutionary thought – having elbowed aside the view that man was created by God – still kept to the theological perspective of in principio veritas. This way of thinking, second nature to a European, held that man, having originated in the animal kingdom, must necessarily be an animal.

But of course this viewpoint is in main a holdover of ancient vintage from Christian theology and European cultural history, not a fact of science.

5. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Summary

In light of the above, it is very interesting to review `Abdu’l-Bahá’s summary of how things stand as given in Some Answered Questions (1906) and entitled THE DIFFERENCE EXISTING BETWEEN MAN AND ANIMAL. He outlines the two sides of the debate

Know that people belong to two categories — that is to say, they constitute two parties.

One party denies that humans are unique:

One party deny the spirit and say that man also is a species of animal; for they say: Do we not see that animals and men share the same powers and senses? … “It is not,” they say, “that [man] has a special power and spirit which the other animals lack: animals possess sensitive bodies, but man in some powers has more sensation, although, in what concerns the outer senses, such as hearing, sight, taste, smell, touch and even in some interior powers like memory, the animal is more richly endowed than man.” “The animal, too,” they say, “has intelligence and perception.” All that they concede is that man’s intelligence is greater.

The other party argues for human uniqueness:

But the theologians say: No, this is not so. Though man has powers and outer senses in common with the animal, yet an extraordinary power exists in him of which the animal is bereft. The sciences, arts, inventions, trades and discoveries of realities are the results of this spiritual power. This is a power which encompasses all things, comprehends their realities, discovers all the hidden mysteries of beings, and through this knowledge controls them. It even perceives things which do not exist outwardly — that is to say, intellectual realities which are not sensible, and which have no outward existence because they are invisible; so it comprehends the mind, the spirit, the qualities, the characters, the love and sorrow of man, which are intellectual realities. …

The animal is the captive of the senses and bound by them; all that is beyond the senses, the things that they do not control, the animal can never understand, although in the outer senses it is greater than man. Hence it is proved and verified that in man there is a power of discovery by which he is distinguished from the animals, and this is the spirit of man.

The differences can be observed empirically. Much as animals can be distinguished from plants, so can humans be distinguished from animals:

Since in the animal there are signs which are not in the plant, you say this power of sensation is a property of the animal spirit; you also see in man signs, powers and perfections which do not exist in the animal; therefore, you infer that there is a power in him which the animal is without.”

Next Week

Given how long this is becoming, I had better stop. Next week, I’ll wrap up our discussion of whether or not humans are animals.

…………………………

This is the 12th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 23, 2012. Humans and animals clearly differ.

Is the difference merely one of degree, as Darwin believed? Or are humans and animals distinctly different?

Above the Laws of Nature

The Baha’i Faith embrace the latter view, as do the world’s major religions. It does so in a very interesting and illuminating way:

Humans, the Bahá’i Faith teaches, possess reason and intellect and can control the laws of nature, whereas animals are confined by nature.

Below we considering the human ability to master nature – and some of its implications. We have – according to the Bahá’i perspective – “supernatural” abilities!

First, let’s consider what nature is.

The Nature of Nature

There are several meanings to the noun nature. One meaning, according to Wikipedia, is the physical universe:

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. “Nature” refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Another two, Wikipedia tells us, are philosophical:

Nature is a concept with two major sets of inter-related meanings, referring on the one hand to the things which are natural, or subject to the normal working of “laws of nature”, or on the other hand to the essential properties and causes of those things to be what they naturally are, or in other words the laws of nature themselves.

A related word, important to discussions about nature, is the term naturalism (for interesting discussions about naturalism, see articles on the topic by Steven Schafersman and Keith Augustine).

Metaphysical naturalism – as opposed to the ordinary naturalism of the physical sciences – holds that everything is a natural phenomena:

… the view that nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature” (Robert Audi, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1984, p. 372)

… the view that everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world. (Alan Lacey, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995, p. 604)

This view is overturned if – as the Bahá’i Writings indicate – the human intellect has powers that control and transcend nature.

A Bahá’i Definition of Nature

Laura Dreyfus-Barney

A Baha’i definition of nature is given in Some Answered Questions, a remarkable book compiled by Laura Dreyfus-Barney (1879-1974), the prominent French-American philanthropist, sculptor, and recipient of chevalier and officier rank of the French Légion d’Honneur. It records Dreyfus-Barney’s talks over several years with `Abdu’l-Bahá – the son of the Bahá’u'lláh, the prophet-founder of the Baha’i Faith.

In the first chapter – entitled Nature is Governed by One Universal Law -`Abdu’l-Bahá defines nature:

Nature is that condition, that reality, which in appearance consists in life and death, or, in other words, in the composition and decomposition of all things. This Nature is subjected to an absolute organization, to determined laws, to a complete order and a finished design, from which it will never depart …

`Abdu’l-Bahá’s definition of nature is the nature of modern science – of modern physics, chemistry, astrophysics, biology. and evolutionary theory. But nature lacks intelligence:

… when you look at Nature itself, you see that it has no intelligence, no will. For instance, the nature of fire is to burn; it burns without will or intelligence. The nature of water is fluidity; it flows without will or intelligence. … Thus it is clear that the natural movements of all things are compelled; there are no voluntary movements except those of animals and, above all, those of man.

We possess intelligence, thus we have a capability that nature lacks:

Man possesses conscious intelligence and reflection; nature does not. … Man can seek out the mysteries latent in nature, whereas nature is not conscious of her own hidden phenomena. … Man is endowed with ideal virtues – for example, intellection, volition, faith, confession and acknowledgment of God – while nature is devoid of all these.

The ideal faculties of man, including the capacity for scientific acquisition, are beyond nature’s ken. These are powers whereby man is differentiated and distinguished from all other forms of life.

The upshot of all of this is that there is a clear distinction between our world and the world of nature. We have the power of intelligence and science, and nature doesn’t. We have the ability to learn in ways that, although prefigured in the animal world, far transcend it.

Edward O. Wilson – no lover of religion – shares this point of view, although he expresses it in a different way. In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012, p. 192) he notes that human nature

“is obvious through its manifestation in everyday life. Its intuitive expression is the substance of the creative arts and the underpinning of the social sciences [although the] very existence of human nature was denied during the last century by most social scientists.”

But, human nature is not

“the genes underlying it. They prescribe the developmental rules of the brain, sensory system, and behavior that produce human nature. Nor can the universals of culture discovered by anthropologists be defined collectively as human nature.”

Rather

“[h]uman nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are the “epigenetic rules,” which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period of prehistory.”

Wilson’s epigenetic rules, although hardwired in, are the basis for learning, not innate behaviors. In other words, humans are hardwired to learn. And what we can learn allows us unprecedented control over nature.

Nature and the Supernatural

If we have powers that transcend nature – if our intellect gives us the ability to control nature – doesn’t that mean we have abilities that are supernatural? Supernatural – of course – means “above nature” from the Latin “supra” meaning “above”.

`Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that this indeed is the case:

All the powers and attributes of man are human and hereditary in origin — outcomes of nature’s processes — except the intellect, which is supernatural.

Through intellectual and intelligent inquiry science is the discoverer of all things. It unites present and past, reveals the history of bygone nations and events, and confers upon man today the essence of all human knowledge and attainment throughout the ages. By intellectual processes and logical deductions of reason this superpower in man can penetrate the mysteries of the future and anticipate its happenings.

And how should we use these supernatural powers? Speaking at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC in the segregated American South on the 23rd of April in 1912, `Abdu’l-Bahá gave the following answer:

How shall we utilize these gifts and expend these bounties? By directing our efforts toward the unification of the human race. We must use these powers in establishing the oneness of the world of humanity, appreciate these virtues by accomplishing the unity of whites and blacks, devote this divine intelligence to the perfecting of amity and accord among all branches of the human family so that under the protection and providence of God the East and West may hold each other’s hands and become as lovers. Then will mankind be as one nation, one race and kind — as waves of one ocean.

Next Week

Next week, we will revisit the topic of what it means to be human, addressing issues raised by materialistic interpretations of evolution and science that insist – without any scientific authority – that there are no higher goals than to be an intelligent animal.

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This is the 11th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 16, 2012. Empirical evidence, informed science, common sense, and ancient wisdom all tell us we are not animals.

What then does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be more than an animal?

Below, we explore the answers given by `Abdu’l-Bahá (1844 – 1921), the extraordinarily articulate and infinitely patient son of Bahá’u'lláh (1817 – 1892), the prophet founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

What Does It Mean To Be Human: A Religious View

To be fully human, according to the teachings of the Baha’i Faith (and the teachings of all the world’s great religions), is both a challenge and a responsibility. It doesn’t come automatically. Each of us has to grow into it by a process in spiritual growth. Humanity is as much potential as it is biological reality.

Being human – this view holds – is not just fitting under a scientific label or a classification. It is a dynamic process requiring effort, struggle, and growth.

Richard Feynman doing science

To fully understand what being human means from a scientific perspective, you have to understand what it means to do science. Doing science is different than cataloging its categories, its hard-won facts, its mathematical formulations of the laws of nature. Doing science is searching for truth, understanding, and knowledge. Doing science is teaching and sharing what you have learned. It is what scientists do, it is a process, an active pursuit – not just dry books on a shelf.

Similarly, being human is more than just having a human mother and father. It is a process, an active pursuit, a desire to grow to the heights of what humans are capable of and the struggle to achieve that desire. Being human means more than just satisfying our instinctual needs.

The Animal Creation is Captive to Nature, But Humans Can Free Themselves

Humans – according to `Abdu’l-Bahá and the texts of most of the world’s religions – have the unique capability of being able to descend to the depths of corruption, injuriousness, and depravity or being able to rise to the heights of kindliness, care, service to humanity, and sanctity of purpose.

We can immerse ourselves in the animal aspect of our nature, but the consequence are dire. `Abdu’l-Bahá puts it this way:

Today all people are immersed in the world of nature. That is why thou dost see jealousy, greed, the struggle for survival, deception, hypocrisy, tyranny, oppression, disputes, strife, bloodshed, looting and pillaging, which all emanate from the world of nature.

… as long as man is captive to nature he is a ferocious animal, as the struggle for existence is one of the exigencies of the world of nature. This matter of the struggle for existence is the fountain-head of all calamities and is the supreme affliction.

Or, we can free ourselves – and others – from captivity to nature and attain to our fully human self:

… the world of nature is an animal world. Until man is born again from the world of nature, that is to say, becomes detached from the world of nature, he is essentially an animal, and it is the teachings of God which convert this animal into a human soul.

And:

I hope that in this nether world thou shalt attain unto heavenly light, thou wilt free the souls from the gloom of nature, which is the animal kingdom, and cause them to reach lofty stations in the human kingdom.

We become human when we ascend from the world of nature:

[Those] who have ascended from the world of nature to the world of man, who have followed the divine Teachings, have served the world of humanity, are resplendent, merciful, illumined and like unto a rose garden. Strive thine utmost to become godlike, characterized with His attributes, illumined and merciful, that thou mayest be freed from every bond …

From this perspective, life is not the pursuit of the satisfaction of instincts (although the Baha’i writings make it abundantly clear that we should enjoy the good things of this life provided that they don’t interfere with our spiritual growth) but is deeper and has profound significance.

Note: This should definitely not be taken to imply that animals are bad or evil. Rather, they are different than humans and not subject to this human duality. They neither have the responsibility to grow via the use of their intelligence nor are they capable – as humans are – of being evil.

The Love of Exaltation

`Abdu’l-Bahá, pushing home the difference between us and the animals, urges us to look at our innate love of exaltation:

Praise be to God! Man is always turned toward the heights, and his aspiration is lofty; he always desires to reach a greater world than the world in which he is, and to mount to a higher sphere than that in which he is. The love of exaltation is one of the characteristics of man.

He urges us to not retreat to the animal world – not to go backward – and expresses his astonishment at philosophers who encourage the opposite:

Icarus falling to earth

I am astonished that certain philosophers of America and Europe are content to gradually approach the animal world and so to go backward; for the tendency of existence must be toward exaltation. Nevertheless, if you said to one of them, “You are an animal,” he would be extremely hurt and angry.

Next Week

A central – and fascinating – aspect of the Baha’i teachings on the difference between humans and animals is the idea that humans are not bound by nature. Next week we explore this topic in more detail. It is – according to the Baha’i writings – our intelligence that makes it possible for us to be free:

The power of the Holy Spirit, enlightening man’s intelligence, has enabled him to discover means of bending many natural laws to his will. He flies through the air, floats on the sea, and even moves under the waters. All this proves how man’s intelligence has been enabled to free him from the limitations of nature, and to solve many of her mysteries. Man, to a certain extent, has broken the chains of matter. (`Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 37-38)

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This is the 10th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Apr 9, 2012. Darwin thought – as many of his followers continue to think – that humans are animals.

This is not a scientific finding – indeed it flies against almost everything we see and can measure in the world around us. Neither is it consistent with the views of many leading researchers in such areas such anthropology and neuroscience. And it certainly isn’t consistent with the perspectives of the religions of the world and their view – honed across millennias of experience – that we are both animal and human.

Let’s consider some of the questions that arise when we consider the view that humans are animals.

A Word of Caution

A word of caution. Our topic is not as simple and straightforward as it may at first seem.

One issue, hidden like the bulk of an iceberg, is the matrix of fundamental political and social changes associated with the emergence of European-style nationalism and its associated forms of political organization, among them modern participatory democracy. Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), widely considered to have laid the foundation for these changes, viewed man as a mechanism – a machine – with animal-like impulses needing to be controlled.

Another issue the emergence of modern rights-based perspectives in politics and social thought that oppose hierarchical political systems associated with divine authority models based on older Christian views of the uniqueness of humanity. In effect, differing considerations of whether or not humans are animals were – and continue to be – pitted against each other as theological and metaphysical arguments for different political systems and conceptions of society, a process that continues unabated today.

Another issue is the changing nature of our relationship with the planet’s animal life and the growing emergence of a stewardship ethos towards animals and wild places.

With this caution in mind, let us proceed.

What Does it Mean Morally, Ethically, Individually, and Socially if Humans are Animals

If we are animals, it means – if it is to mean anything – that we are bound to the dictates of our animal nature. No higher law binds us and there is no escape. Otherwise, we are not animals.

Obviously, people like Darwin, other enlightened thinkers, and many decent and progressive modern thinkers, didn’t – and don’t – really think that they themselves and their social equals are ordinary animals. They were – and are – exploring new intellectual ideas, their implications, and their usefulness. What they didn’t understand – and often still don’t – is that others can take their ideas and use them to cause severe damage to the public interest, invoking their supposed scientific authority.

What is nature of the animal nature we are bound to?

First and foremost it means instinctual behavior – we are hardwired to act in certain ways. We eat, protect ourselves, procreate, fight for dominance, attack and decimate others, engage in protective group behavior, gang up and bully others, lovingly raise our children, demonize and kill those that who outside of our group, act altruistically, follow alpha males or alpha females dogmatically and obediently, and don’t think about the consequences of our action.

It also means that we can learn behaviors. We can learn from the experience of our parents, our groups, and from those who train us.

There are, of course, many unanswered questions about what our animal behavior actually is. Does it mean, like Freud taught, that unknowable instinctual sexual drives in our youth drive our adult behavior? Does it then follow we achieve freedom and the happiness of society by engagement in sexual expression that “turns us on?”

Does it mean, as Friedrich Nietzsche taught, that the will to power – “achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life” is “the main driving force in man,” that religious morality is for slaves, and that exceptional people – the Nietschean uebermensch – must obey no moral code beyond that of their own inner nature?

Does it mean, as Karl Marx wrote, “that what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production?”

Does it mean, as the biologist Edmund O. Wilson famously asked, that “Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species … and that no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history”? Elaborating further in On Animal Nature (1978), Wilson notes the implications of modern sociobiological views of the man’s animal nature:

If the brain evolved by natural selection, even the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process. They are either direct adaptations to past environments in which the ancestral human populations evolved or at most constructions thrown up secondarily by deeper, less visible activities that were once adaptive in this stricter, biological sense.

The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

This grab bag of different views of our nature – and I haven’t even started to do them justice – is a heritage of Darwin’s view. And not a one of them has scientific justification. They are at best unproven scientific hypotheses, or more usually, pseudo-science.

Their moral, ethical, individual, social and intellectual implications are similarly a grab bag – and sometimes we choose among them in a haphazard and almost random fashion until they create disasters and chaos. We then move on to another until the next disaster.

Sometimes we are told that war – the will to power – is what makes us noble and great. So, we massacre tens of millions in its name. Other times, we are told that our particular racial group is superior and that others are inferior, so we enslave them and kill them in the tens of millions. Or, we say that sexual freedom and the pursuit of ecstasy is our intrinsic nature, and we create deadly drug cartels to supply our resulting drug habits that then proceed to impoverish Mexico and Central America. Or, we follow Marx’s bidding and create societies driven by communism – or capitalism – that disadvantage the many for the benefit of the few.

To be honest, its hard not to regard these ideas cynically.

The Baha’i View: Humanity Is Able to Free Itself from Nature’s Bonds

The Baha’i view, as we have mentioned before, is distinctly different. Humans, although they share certain attributes with animals, possess attributes that set them apart:

The reality of man is his thought, not his material body. The thought force and the animal force are partners. Although man is part of the animal creation, he possesses a power of thought superior to all other created beings.

The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.

Central to the Baha’i view of human nature is a distinction between the natural world – where the laws of nature dictate what happens – and our human reality – where we can escape their dictate. Next week, we will explore this perspective in more detail.

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This is the 9th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Apr 2, 2012. In our last blog, we saw that Darwin thought of humans as animals – with sophisticated capabilities to be sure – but still animals. In no small part because of Darwin’s prestige and influence – many continue to think so today.

Is such thinking scientifically sound? Or is it simply received opinion?

Christians invariably think differently than Darwin. They view humans as created in God’s image and distinctly different than animals.

Is this just belief, or is it scientifically sound?

The Baha’i writings emphasize that what makes humans unique is their intellectual endowment, not their physical makeup. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá urges us to understand human reality by considering our spiritual nature, not our animal nature:

… there are men whose eyes are only open to physical progress and to the evolution in the world of matter. These men prefer to study the resemblance between their own physical body and that of the ape, rather than to contemplate the glorious affiliation between their spirit and that of God. This is indeed strange, for it is only physically that man resembles the lower creation, with regard to his intellect he is totally unlike it.”

and

The reality of man is his thought, not his material body. The thought force and the animal force are partners. Although man is part of the animal creation, he possesses a power of thought superior to all other created beings.

Is this contradictory to science?

What Makes an Answer Scientific?

To determine whether an answer to a question is scientific or not, one might simply ask scientists what they think — often a very interesting thing to do. Clearly, it would be fun to survey the views and opinions of a large number of scientists in a wide variety of disciplines on this question. But is it the correct thing to do?

We know Darwin’s opinion — he thinks man is an animal. And we know his reasons for thinking so — all the capabilities he sees in humans are found in nascent form in animals. But, and this is an important point, it is clear that he has not done more than just form an opinion in the context of his understanding of evolution.

Most importantly, personal opinion is just opinion — no matter how eminent the thinker or scientist: it is totally different than a well-established scientific fact or theory. And we know that the opinion of scientists is frequently wrong. For example, it was the opinion of a great many scientists in Japan that the Fukushima nuclear power plant was safe from damage due to a tsunami. Their opinion was wrong.

So, the opinion of Darwin, or of a few eminent scientists, is not the answer we seek. We need scientific answers.

How Do We Find a Scientific Answer to Our Question?

Karl Popper

A question — or an answer — is a scientific question or answer if it can be answered or supported scientifically. Or, spelling it out more clearly, a question is a scientific question if it can be answered empirically — i.e., by gathering the facts and judging them by some clear criteria. A scientific answer is such an answer

It is also a scientific question if it can be answered by a justified appeal to well established scientific findings. It is a scientific answer by similar light.

Sir Karl Popper — the eminent philosopher of science — famously said that science had to be falsifiable. If answers to questions could not — in either practice or principle — be shown to be wrong, then the questions being asked could not be said to be scientific. Popper — to name a famous example — didn’t think that Freudian psychology was a science. You couldn’t prove it was wrong.

So we have three paths to explore:

1. What are facts and the clear criteria by which we can answer the question about whether we are human or not?
2. Are we able to appeal to well-established scientific findings?
3. Are our results falsifiable?

1. What are the Facts? And by what Criteria Does One Evaluate the Facts

Clearly, if we can are going to determine whether humans are animals or not, we have to establish a criteria by which to evaluate the facts of the matter. What should this criteria be?

It is easy to think of many, but let’s pick only several: biological, intellectual, social, cultural, and spiritual. Are we biologically, intellectually, socially, culturally and spiritually different than animals?

Biologically, the question is simple. Do humans have the same biological properties as animals? The answer, too, is simple. Even considering differences in hand dexterity, speech capabilities, upright posture, and brain functioning, man is an animal biologically.

What about intellectually? In a large variety of intellectual categories one can think of — intelligence, mastery of abstract principles, language, science, etc. — humans surpass animals by large margins. So, if you define the distinction between humans and values in terms of intellectual capabilities, clearly humans are different than animals — that is unless you set the judgement bar very low.

Suppose, for example, that you devise an intelligence test that both humans and animals can take and suppose that on average iguanas score 02, dogs 04, dolphins 06 and humans 100. Now, suppose that you further set a criteria for judging the difference between humans as the level 05. Then you might say: “Look! Both dolphins and humans are in the same category. Both score above 05.” Then you claim that dolphins and humans are the same according to your tests, and therefore they can’t be differentiated. Both are therefore animals.

But the bar has been set so artificially low that the criteria for measurement is not meaningful. It’s like saying that both Singapore and Antarctica have days where the temperature exceeds zero degrees centigrade so their climate is the same.

This is essentially what Darwin and his followers have done. They point out that all the traits that we think of as human — intelligence, rationality, culture, empathy, group behavior, and the like — have counterparts, albeit at different levels of complexity, in the animal world. Therefore they conclude that humans are not distinct from and different than animals.

But, again, this is like saying that Singapore has the same weather as Antarctica because both have days where the temperature exceeds freezing. In all these example cases, no scientifically valid criteria — one that distinguishes differences that are clearly shown in the data — has been applied. The conclusion that Darwin and his followers draw — it is very clear — is scientifically suspect.

Clearly, similar types of arguments apply to social and cultural issues. There are great differences in degree between humans and animals, even acknowledging the surprising and fascinating social cultures that we know animates life for animals like elephants and killer whales.

As to spiritual capabilities, the distinction cannot be drawn in the same way as for intelligence, society, and culture. But if we consider spirituality as intelligence-driven learning based on incorporating moral and ethical principles into both one’s considered and habitual responses, clearly intelligence, society, and culture provide indicators for spiritual capacity much in the same way as temperature, humidity, air pressure, and wind velocity provide indicators for the weather.

2. Can we appeal to appeal to well-established scientific findings?

Scientific findings appear to be a mixed bag, originally favoring the idea that humans are animals, but now tending towards the view that humans are unique. The paleo-anthropologist Ian Tattersall — a leading expert human on evolution and the fossil record — describes the situation thus in Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness, (1998, pp. 188-189) :

Homo sapiens is not simply an improved version of its ancestors — its a new concept, qualitatively distinct from them in highly significant if limited respects.

… what has neatly been called “human capacity” in not simply an extrapolation of the earlier trends in our lineage that the studies of paleo-anthropologists are designed to elucidate. It is more akin to an “emergent quantity” whereby for chance reasons a new combination of features produces totally unexpected results.

In 1998, this was pushing the envelope and accordingly viewed disapprovingly (see for example, the New York Times review of the book). Large numbers of scientists then held — and many still do — to the traditional Darwinian perspective: humans are animals. Describing the conflicting views, the prominent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique put it this way:

Thousands of scientists and philosophers over hundreds of years have either recognized this uniqueness of ours or have denied it and looked for the antecedents of everything human in other animals.

Gazzaniga’s own conclusions are similar to Tattersall’s:

I have decided something like a phase shift has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one thing that will ever account for our spectacular abilities, aspirations and capacity to travel mentally in time to almost the infinite world beyond our present existence. Even though we have all of these connections with the biologic world from which we came, and we have in some instances similar mental structures, we are hugely different. While most of our genes and brain architecture are held in common with animals, there are always differences to be found.

So it is not totally clear what science is saying. Large number of scientists hold to the traditional Darwinian perspective that humans are animals. But new research — carried out by scientists like Tattersall and Gazzaniga — are pointing increasingly away from the Darwinian perspective (see for example modern studies of human uniqueness).

3. Are Our Results Falsifiable?

The third criteria we proposed was falsifiability. Answers to scientific questions need to be disprovable if they are to be valid.

In this case, we have seen that the Darwinian perspective is to dismiss criteria like differences in intellectual capacity as meaningless, citing the idea that animals have rudimentary capabilities similar in kind to those of humans to support the idea that humans are animals.

But this violates the falsifiability criterion. No level of difference between humans and animals can ever change the conclusions when considered this way. So, their answer can’t be falsified and by Popper’s falsifiability criteria, are not scientific.

Conclusion: Humans are Not Animals

So our conclusion is both straightforward and nuanced. In so far as biology is concerned, humans are animals. But insofar as other criteria — intelligence etc. — are considered, humans are different than animals. And this is not a surprising result.

So, humans are not animals, except biologically.

What is surprising — at least to me — is how weak and “unsciency” the view that humans are animals is. Arguments in support of that conclusion have to ignore differences in quality — and these differences are what makes scientific ideas testable and empirical — in favor of vague ideas of similarity and/or evolutionary origins. If there are any signs of intelligence — for example — in dogs, then it shows that humans are like dogs and therefore like animals. Its a weird way to think, and perhaps a no longer needed “spandrel” from the development of evolutionary thought.

Next Week

Next week, we consider the issue of the implications of our conclusions that — scientifically, as well as religiously — humans are not animals.

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This is the 8th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Mar 19, 2012. Are humans a kind of animal?

Darwin, and before him Linnaeus, thought so. The world’s major religions, however, think not.

Therein lies a problem and a source of considerable conflict, including rancorous continuing debates about the teaching of evolution, over modern sexual mores, over abortion, and over what it is to be a human being. These debates that are a major source of division and contention in modern America and around the world.

The view that we are animals was endorsed by Darwin and has been embraced by many interpreters of evolution and by disciplines like sociobiology. Where did Darwin get this view? And is it defensible scientifically?

Human Uniqueness in Pre-Enlightenment European Thought

Before and even during the Enlightenment – which began 1650 – 1700 and continued until about 1800 – most Europeans viewed humans as distinct and different than animals. The Christian view predominated, and it looked to Judaic Scripture – the book of Genesis (Gen 1:26-27) – as its authority:

²⁶And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

²⁷So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Christianity taught then – as it teaches now – that humans have a soul and this distinguishes us from the rest of creation. This view is expressed cohesively in the Common Declaration on Environmental Ethics (2002) signed by Pope John Paul II and Bartholomew I, the leading Patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy.

At the centre of the whole of creation, He placed us, human beings, with our inalienable human dignity. Although we share many features with the rest of the living beings, Almighty God went further with us and gave us an immortal soul, the source of self-awareness and freedom, endowments that make us in His image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26-31; 2:7).”

Philosophers looked to Descartes and other like-minded thinkers who taught that there was a vast difference between animals and humans. According to Descartes, animals lack minds and language, setting them apart from humans. Here are some of his comments (from Animals are Machines in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence):

Now by these … means one can also know the difference between men and beasts. For it is rather remarkable that there are no men so dull and so stupid (excluding not even the insane), that they are incapable of arranging various words together and of composing from them a discourse by means of which they might make their thoughts understood, and that, on the other hand, there is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be, that does the like. … And this attests not merely to the fact that beasts have less reason than men but that they have none at all.

It is also a very remarkable fact that although many animals show more skill than we do in some of their actions, yet the same animals show none at all in many others; so what they do better does not prove that they have any intelligence, for if it did then they would have more intelligence than any of us and would excel us in everything. It proves rather that they have no intelligence at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs.

Both religion and philosophy agreed: humans were unique.

Human Uniqueness in Pre-Darwinian European Thought

But views that humans were unique were increasingly challenged by the time that Darwin was thinking about evolution. Linnaeus (1707-1778), as we saw in blog 5, had already classified us as primates – along with orangutans and chimpanzees – and put us into the animal kingdom, claiming biological similarities. And the enlightenment had changed everything – religion was no longer in the driver’s seat:

… until the 1650s Western civilization “was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority”. Up until this date most intellectual debates revolved around “confessional” – that is Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), or Anglican issues”, and the main aim of these debates was to establish which bloc of faith ought to have the “monopoly of truth and a God-given title to authority”. After this date everything thus previously rooted in tradition was questioned and often replaced by new concepts in the light of philosophical reason.

After the second half of the 17th century and during the 18th century a “general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology’s age-old hegemony in the world of study”, and that confessional disputes was reduced to a secondary status in favor of the escalating contest between faith and incredulity”. [Age of Enlightenment, Wikipedia, quoting Jonathan Israel, accessed Mar 18, 2012]

The authority of religion – and the belief in the soul – had been attacked and deeply undermined. Secular belief – often pursued with the same fanatical devotion that once had characterized religious belief – shoved aside religion. The view that man was superior came to be considered as outmoded thinking from the past – and was proclaimed as false by “scientific” thought.

Philosophically, Descartes’ view of man as being superior to the animals was challenged by English political, mechanistic, and empirical philosophy – i.e., by the beginnings of modern materialism, atheism – as well as by other enlightenment trends.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often considered a key instigator. Robert P. Kraynak – a political historian who studies liberalism and conservatism – describes Hobbes’ contributions here. Hobbes, according to Kraynack, held that:

… man is a complex machine moved by mechanical responses to images of external objects. This view is developed in Leviathan, Part I, which gives the materialist account of man as a creature of appetites and aversions: seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and desiring power after power. … [His] model shows that human beings are selfish, competitive, and anti-social, and that they are rational only insofar as reason serves the selfish passions.

These views, despite concerns about Hobbes’ support for royal absolutism, were highly influential:

… he convinced many people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to change their views of the proper ends of government—from promoting the higher goods of virtue and salvation to protecting the limited goods of life, personal liberty, and property—inaugurating the natural rights principles of modern liberalism that became the basis of an enlightened middle-class materialism or “bourgeois” view of morality.

The net effect of Hobbes influence – and the influence of many other thinkers – was that Darwin came of age in an era where progressive thought saw the uniqueness of man as a theological holdover from the past inconsistent with the new truths of political liberalism and scientifically informed philosophy. It would be hard for Darwin not to be swayed by such thinking, especially since his view of evolution was one of gradual change, rather than of radical transitions.

So, Darwin, it is clear, thought in a cultural climate where belief in man’s superiority above the animals was still assumed, but it was a superiority of degree, not of kind. And this view was supported by his view that evolution was a simple mechanistic process of slow change. And he accepted this view as correct and scientifically sound.

But was it scientifically sound?

Next Week

Next week, we explore the scientific soundness of Darwin’s views. Given the huge spectrum of differences – some very substantial – between humans and the animals, is it still correct to say that humans are just animals?

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This is the 7th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Mar 12, 2012. What do the evolutionary sciences say about the relationship between humans and animals? Are humans just mentally proficient animals, or do we belong in a human kingdom separate and distinct from the animal kingdom?

For many people, including those who see religion and science as in conflict, this is a crucial question. They argue that if the evolutionary sciences tell us that we are animals and religion tell us that we are not, then it implies one of two things:

• Religion is wrong – and we were created by the blind forces of nature
• Evolution is wrong – and we were created by God

And this is how many people see things. Underlying much of modern atheism, humanism and secularism is the view that science – in this case, evolution – has shown humans to just be animals whose origins are explained by natural processes.Therefore, the argument goes, we are not created by God. Religion has got it wrong and therefore itself is wrong.

The opposing view – underlying the growing antagonism against evolution, environmentalism, and climate science – is that evolution is not a science, but simply just a human doctrine – some call it materialism, others naturalism – that seeks to undermine religion.

Two things, I suggest, bear noticing:

1. The distrust of evolution doesn’t carry over into a distrust of the sciences in general – physics, chemistry, biology and the like – but mainly to “big picture” claims of science that are seen as competing with religion, and those sciences that affect public policy.
2. These views don’t make a distinction between what science actually says and what is claimed in the name of science, two things that can be quite different. For others – including many scientists and religious thinkers – the views stated above are naively simplistic, uninformed, and deeply rooted in 19th century scientism.

Do the Darwinian evolutionary sciences indeed support the view that we are animals? Lets take a look.

What Did Darwin Say About the Relationship of Humans to Animals?

Darwin published his ground-breaking On The Origin of the Species in 1859, but didn’t then address the issue of human evolution. It wasn’t until 1871 and the publication of The Descent of Man that he did so. The entry on Charles Darwin in Wikipedia summarizes the views he then presented:

Darwin set out evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes, and presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock’s plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial characteristics, while emphasizing that humans are all one species.

Basically, Darwin believed that humans were animals with better minds. Here is how he put it in The Descent of Man:

There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense. An anthropomorphous ape [could not] follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene. Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

He summarizes his arguments for this view as follows:

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc. of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Then, surprisingly after acknowledging the immense difference between the mind of man and the animals, he dismisses the difference in minds as incidental and due to the use of language:

If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, &c. were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language.

Darwin, it seems, was a Darwinist! He believed that humans are animals with enlarged mental capacities resulting from the use of language.

What Do the Modern Evolutionary Sciences Say About the Relationship of Humans to Animals?

What does modern science say?

Darwin – as authoritative as he is often seen to be – was merely a scientist, not a divine prophet. For his ideas to have scientific validity, they have to be tested empirically. Accordingly, we look at how well they have fared.

The Smithsonian Institution, the magisterial American repository of scientific knowledge, summarizes modern scientific findings about human evolution as follows:

Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

So, yes, according to modern science, we originated from apelike ancestors.

Our Family Tree

Are we animals? Here is what the Smithsonian says:

Humans are primates. Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species, Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa — chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas — share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent.

So science is telling us that anatomically we are animals and that we are descended from animals. Ursala Goodenough, writing in a blog at NPR, puts it this way:

[A]ll modern beings share ancestry, via countless convergences, with an original cellular creature (as expanded here). … The [most recent common ancestor] of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos is indicated by the dashed circle in Our Family Tree [see illustration above.]

Science also tells us that from the viewpoint of our genes, we are very similar to the primates. Recently, a research group deciphered the genetic code of Kamilah, a 165 kg gorilla living at the San Diego zoo, to explore the differences and similarities with respect to human genetic code. The authors concluded that:

… the data suggest that gorillas split from their common ancestor with humans and chimps about 10 million years ago, and that chimps and humans split from each other about 4 million years after that.

So science is also telling us that genetically we are very similar to chimpanzees and the other great apes. Genetic comparisons with chimpanzees show that:

… the genetic difference between humans and chimps is less than 2%,or 20 times larger than the [genetic] variation among modern humans.

How Does Darwin Fare

So, how well has Darwin – and his view that humans are mentally advanced animals – fared? It is now 140 years after he published his ideas.

Darwin’s ideas about the anatomical relationship between humans and the great apes has fared very well indeed. Genetic studies not available in his day have strongly supported the view that humans are related to the apes and there is an embarrassment of solid empirical studies that support his view. We have to conclude anatomically that Darwin was correct.

But the view that the difference between humans and animals is “one of degree and not of kind” has not been quantitatively substantiated. Qualitatively, it strikes most people – and probably most scientists as well – as just plain wrong.

Humans, according to the best science we have, are descended from animals.

But are we different than – or the same as – animals? That has not been decided.

It looks like it is a matter of belief and definition. If you hold as a first principle, as Darwin did, that our intellect – and its capabilities – is not something that distinguishes us from the animals, then and only then is it legitimate to say that difference is “one of degree and not of kind”. But this is a belief, not something that comes from science.

Next Week

So we have to continue our study. Where did this belief of Darwin’s that we are animals come from? Next week, we will further explore the Darwinist view – as opposed to the evolutionary science view – that there is no distinction between animals and humans.

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This is the 6th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Mar 4, 2012. Are we animals?

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) – the father of modern biological classification (taxonomy) – thought so. He classified humans as primates – along with orangutans and chimpanzees – and put us into the animal kingdom. Modern biological classification schemes keep to the Linneaen scheme. They too say we are part of the hominid family – the great apes – and belong to the animal kingdom.

The Baha’i Faith thinks not. Humans, even though we share most of the biological functionings of animals, are different.

Common sense in the main agrees with the Baha’i Faith and the other world religions. We build airplanes, carry out scientific investigations, and surf the internet. Animals do not. The Linnaean classification scheme, clearly, is a biological one that doesn’t address broader issues of our mind and its uses.

Linneaus

The Darwinian perspective complicates things. If (a) humanity is descended from the animals as Darwinism concludes, then it seems logical that (b) humans too are animals, and that (c) what and who we are can be understood by understanding our evolutionary past and our animal origins. We will put off discussing it for now.

Does it Matter if We are Animals?

Is it important if we are animals or not?

Intuitively we know that there is a difference. I never mistake Charlie our dog for a human being. For one thing, he doesn’t do the dishes!

The Multiple Meanings of ‘Animal’

An animal named Charlie

The problem is that animal is a word with many connotations. It can mean “brutish, cruel, and bestial” or “instinctive, unthinking, and reactive,” especially when applied to humans. Or it can be a descriptor of all living things that are motile (moving independently and spontaneously). Mary Midgley, my favorite English philosopher, puts it this way in The Myths We Live By:

If anthropologists from a strange planet came here to study our intellectual habits and customs … they would find us using a single word – animal – to describe an immense range of creatures, including ourselves, from blue whales to tiny microorganisms that are quite hard to distinguish from plants.

On the other hand, they would note also that the commonest use of this word ‘animal’ is that in which we use it to contrast all these other organisms with our own single species, speaking of animals as distinct from humans.

A common usage is a moral one, she notes. “You have behaved like animals!” says the judge. This might mean something like “you have crashed through the barriers of culture, barriers which alone protect us from from a sea of hideous motivations.” In this case:

Another animal (name unknown)

… ‘animal’ stand for the inhuman, the anti-human. It represents the forces that we fear in our own nature, forces that we are unwilling to regard as a true part of it.

Another usage can have positive connotations, as widely recognized by the animal rights movement:

To think of ourselves seriously as animals is to regard the other animals as our kin; it inevitably leads us in some degree to welcome them, to identify with them, to see their cause as our own.

The Spiritual Perspective

`Abdu

The spiritual perspective places an emphasis on what is exclusively human – our mind, our intellect, and our spiritual nature. The spiritual focus is on the nourishment and care of that intellect and the development of its ethical, moral, and intellectual powers. It holds that our human reality is distinct and different than the reality of animals, even though we share in that reality.

The Baha’i perspective is in close accord with most other religions and is well illustrated in talks that `Abdu’l-Baha gave across Europe and North America. Speaking to the thunderous applause of the body of teachers and students at Stanford University in 1912, he put it this way:

Man is the noblest of the creatures. In his physical organism he possesses the virtues of the mineral kingdom. Likewise, he embodies the augmentative virtue, or power of growth, which characterizes the kingdom of the vegetable. Furthermore, in his degree of physical existence he is qualified with functions and powers peculiar to the animal, beyond which lies the range of his distinctive human mental and spiritual endowment.

Animals can be savage, but it is not a wrong. Human savagery is different:

If the animals are savage and ferocious, it is simply a means for their subsistence and preservation. They are deprived of that degree of intellect which can reason and discriminate between right and wrong, justice and injustice; they are justified in their actions and not responsible. When man is ferocious and cruel toward his fellowman, it is not for subsistence or safety. His motive is selfish advantage and willful wrong.

Humans, equipped with a gift that animals lack, can escape the limitations of nature:

In nature there is the law of the survival of the fittest. … The purpose and object of schools, colleges and universities is to educate man and thereby rescue and redeem him from the exigencies and defects of nature … It is evident, then, that the intended and especial function of man is to rescue and redeem himself from the inherent defects of nature and become qualified with the ideal virtues of Divinity.

At Stanford, `Abdu'l-Baha warned of the carnage to come in World War I

Then, shall man live at the level of the animal kingdom given the powers he possesses?

God has endowed him with a power whereby he can even overcome the laws and phenomena of nature, wrest the sword from nature’s hand and use it against nature itself. Shall he, then, remain its captive, even failing to qualify under the natural law which commands the survival of the fittest?

… shall he continue to live upon the level of the animal kingdom without distinction between them and himself in natural impulses and ferocious instincts? There is no lower degree nor greater debasement for man than this natural condition of animalism.

Yes, it Does Matter

So, according to religion, it does matter whether or not we consider ourselves animals. It means recognizing our own station and working our whole life to rise to it. And it means working with all of humanity to do it as well. And yes, it does not exclude recognizing our close kinship with the animals and working to their benefit.

We should recognize that there is divine spark within ourselves, one that makes us different than our brethren animals. We should recognize our freedom from nature’s blind dictates, and we should recognize that we have powers – and responsibilities – that animals don’t have.

And it is misguided or wrong – religions agree – to not do so.

Next Week

Next week,we continue our look at Darwinian theories of human descent. What can we learn from knowing what science says about our origins?

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This is the 5th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Feb 26, 2012. 12 years into the 21st century and 150 years after its beginnings, Darwinism generates more interest, dissension, discussion, disagreement, enthusiasm, press, and book launches than any other science.

Darwin is celebrated and honored to the point of deification – and equally reviled. Clearly, something more than science is at play.What is it about Darwinism that that gets people so upset or so excited?

Philip Johnson, the guiding light of the intelligent design movement, answers this way in Darwin on Trial:

The literature of Darwinism is full of anti-theistic conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing about us. What is more, these statements are not presented as personal opinions but as the logical implications of evolutionary science.

Stephen Jay Gould, the celebrated paleontologist agrees – excepting for the personal opinion part. Writing in 1997, he describes Darwinism and its mechanism of natural selection as radical and harsh:

The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, proves the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the old-style theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions, and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version).

To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success—nothing else, and nothing higher (no force, for example, works explicitly for the good of species or the harmony of ecosystems).

The very phenomena that traditional views cite as proof of benevolence and intentional order—the good design of organisms and the harmony of ecosystems—arise by Darwin’s process of natural selection only as side consequences of a singular causal principle of apparently opposite meaning: organisms struggling for themselves alone.

For others, including many secular and atheistic thinkers, Darwinism is a liberation from dogmas of the past. Richard Dawkins claims in The Blind Watchmaker that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

We will examine these issues in more detail in coming blogs, but before we do so, lets briefly catalog the varieties of views embraced under the rubric of Darwinism.

Evolution and Its Implications

Here is a short list of ideas that supporters and detractors alike see as being implied by Darwinism:

1. Human descent
   1. Humanity is descended from the animals
   2. Humans are animals
   3. Who we are can best be understood by understanding our evolutionary and animal origins.
2. The Origins of Life
   1. Life was created by “blind natural processes that care nothing about us”
   2. Evolution is driven by randomness and is not progressive
   3. The universe “was not designed and has no purpose”
3. Implications for Religion
   1. There is no need for a creator or God to explain how we came into being
   2. The Biblical story of creation is wrong
   3. Religion, having gotten the story of creation wrong, has proven itself wrong
4. Natural Selection and Its Implications
   1. Competition is the driving force behind the origins of humanity
   2. Natural selection, adaptation, and sexual competition are what drives evolution forward
   3. Those who have won the the competition game of natural selection are more evolutionarily fit – i.e., superior – to those who have not
   4. Breeding – selection for fitness – is a way to improve the lot of humanity (this is no longer a respectable belief)

Are these REALLY the implications of Darwinian evolution and modern evolutionary science?

If so, then Phillip Johnson, the creationists, and the Discovery Institute is right – evolution presents clear challenges to religion and is indeed a materialistic philosophy (by materialistic, I mean denying the existence of spiritual and divine aspects of reality).

If so, then Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the New Atheists are also right – religion is incompatible with what science teaches us about the world.

But what if, as Phillip Johnson suggests, these views are only personal opinions and not “the logical implications of evolutionary science?” This is increasingly the view of the less ideologically inclined from academic, scientific, theological, and religious sides.

Changing Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Evolution

In the first half of the 20th century, it was assumed by those with advanced university educations that religion was a hold-over from the past, soon to be discarded. The influential logical positivists said that only science could provided valid approaches to the truth.

British Cabinet minister warns of the threat of militant secularization

But in the last half of the 20th century, the intellectual climate shifted. The logical positivists – to their credit – realized that they couldn’t scientifically validate their central thesis. Rachel Carson, in the Silent Spring, started the modern environmental movement by documenting the damage that modern scientific technologies were inflicting on the world around us. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, introduced the idea of the paradigm shift AND the idea that “normal” science was done in the context of fixed paradigms. Scientists, just like ordinary human beings, thought with the values of those around them.

One effect of all this was the opening of a door to a recognition that science and religion weren’t in disagreement. William Hatcher, a mathematician, a Baha’i, and an accomplished writer, may have been the first to announce the modern formulation of this, but Ian Barbour’s work is better known and generally gets the credit. By the end of the 20th century, it was widely acknowledged that God was scientifically respectable again.

The New Atheists were the predictable backlash, and the British government now warns of the threat of militant secularization.

The Modern Perspective

The modern perspective on evolution and religion is perhaps best exemplified in the thinking of two prominent philosophers, Michael Ruse and Alvin Plantinga. Ruse, perhaps the best known current philosopher of science and a historian of science, specializes in the philosophy of biology and evolution and does not believe in religion. But he believes in talking to people who believe in religion and is aware and knowledgeable about their concerns. He frequently addresses the relationship between evolution and religion. His Can a Darwinian be a Christian (2001) is representative of his thinking. Here is how Jerry Coyne describes Ruse’s conclusions in the London Review of Books:

[Ruse] maintains that at least one form of science (Darwinism) and one form of religion (Christianity) are mutually reinforcing. They are reconcilable, he asserts, because virtually every tenet of conservative Christianity, including original sin, the immortality of the soul and moral choice, is immanent within Darwinism and an inevitable result of the evolutionary process. Religion and science are, to Ruse, merely two sides of the same coin.

For the views of four other influential thinkers on the topic, see PBS’s Roundtable on Science and Faith and comments by Francisco Ayala, Mark Noll, Arthur Peacocke, and Robert Pollack.

We save the last word for Alvin Plantinga, whose Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011) appears to be well on its way to be being the definitive modern argument for the agreement of science and religion. He holds that science and religion are in agreement, but that science and materialism (which he calls naturalism) are not:

My overall thesis: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and religion, and superficial concord but deep conflict between science and naturalism.

With regards to evolution, he holds that:

The scientific theory of evolution just as such is entirely compatible with the thought that God has guided and orchestrated the course of evolution, planned and directed it, in such a way as to achieve the ends he intends.

On the one hand, therefore, we have the scientific theory, and on the other, there is the claim that the course of evolution is not directed or guided or orchestrated by anyone; it displays no teleology; it is blind and unforeseeing …

This claim, however, despite its strident proclamation, is no part of the scientific theory as such; it is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on. On the one hand there is the scientific theory; on the other, the metaphysical add-on, according to which the process is unguided. The first is part of current science, and deserves the respect properly accorded to a pillar of science; but the first is entirely compatible with theism. The second supports naturalism, all right, but is not part of science, and does not deserve the respect properly accorded science. And the confusion of the two – confusing the scientific theory with the result of annexing that add-on to it, confusing evolution as such with unguided evolution – deserves not respect, but disdain.

Next week,we look at Darwinian theories of human descent in light of the Baha’i teachings about the station of the intellect.

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This is the 4th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he authored Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Feb 19, 2012. Creationism and intelligent design (ID) are two modern religious responses to evolution and modern secular thought. Both think of evolution as a materialistic creation story and as an invalid science (as we show below).

Have you heard the old phrase “throwing out the baby with the bath water,” meaning to reject both the bad and the good?

Take the bad as the 19th/20th century quasi-religious secular creation stories inspired by the evolutionary sciences that were part of the fuel for “scientific” racism, eugenics, murderous Nazi tendencies, the supposed inevitability of Marxist forms of social organization, and modern materialistic ideologies both left and right. Take the good as the powerful body of scientific theories concerning evolution and the supporting evidence for those theories (a combination that has proven the unity of the humanity beyond any conceivable doubt). Then reject them both, offer quasi-scientific religious views in their stead, and you have creationism and its much more sophisticated cousin, intelligent design.

This approach to evolution drives the supporters of evolution and modern institutional science – folks who tend towards complete cluelessness on the topic or worse – into an apoplectic frenzy and has led to reams and reams of rhetorical overkill in response. Creationists and intelligent designers take this as proof and vindication of the correctness of their approach, and it seems to be a major factor driving broad public acceptance of creationist and intelligent design views.

As contrast, consider Baha’i perspectives which also reject purely material descriptions of reality and the purposeless of nature. These perspectives hold that all things are God’s creation, including the intelligence and reason we have been given that allows us to create science, the most laudable of all human achievements. With respect to evolution, the Baha’i perspective is that all things develop through a gradual unfolding process consistent with evolution, even though they have their origin as God’s creation:

[T]he growth and development of all beings is gradual; this is the universal divine organization and the natural system. The seed does not at once become a tree; the embryo does not at once become a man; the mineral does not suddenly become a stone. No, they grow and develop gradually and attain the limit of perfection.

For more details on the Baha’i writings as they relate to evolution, see Mehanian and Friberg.

Modern Creationism: A Short History

Last week, we described the origins of creationism as coming about because of an early 20th century American evangelical rejection of social Darwinism and the resulting evangelical campaign to prevent the teaching of evolution in public schools. This led to the famous Scopes Trial (1925) and the severe curtailment of evolution education at the pre-university level that persisted until the Sputnik crisis of 1957.

Modern creationism — creation science, according to its supporters — started in 1961 with the publication of The Genesis Flood by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb. Creationism’s basic views can best be seen at The Basic Tenets of Creationism, The Institute for Creation Research, or at www.creationism.org.

Morris — a hydraulics engineer and civil engineering university professor — and Whitcomb argued for a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis. God created the earth — they claimed — in six days roughly 6,000 years ago, meaning that they embraced the once standard account of the earth’s age.

This view, they recognized, was not in accord with the findings of modern geology and its conclusion that the earth is 4.5 billion years old in a universe some 13 billion years old. Modern geology, they stated, was wrong. The abundant evidence for the age of the earth that geologists appeal to — folds in the earth’s crust, layer after layer of sediment laden with animal skeletons turned to stone, weathering processes of great age — can all be scientifically explained by the great flood described in the book of Genesis.

Modern geologists mistakenly believe in the ancient dating of the earth’s age, Morris wrote, because of a “moral and emotional decision” to seek ‘intellectual justification for escape from personal responsibility to his Creator and escape from the ‘way of the Cross’ as the necessary and sufficient means of his personal redemption.’”

Later, in “The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict (1989) Morris wrote against what he saw as the denial of supernatural creation:

[T]he denial of God – rejecting the reality of supernatural creation and the creator’s sovereign rule of the world – has always been the root cause of every human problem.

Langdon Gilkey, the prominent Protestant theologian, elaborates:

Creationists regard evolution and all other theories associated with it, as the intellectual source for and intellectual justification of everything that is to them evil and destructive in modern society. For them all that is spiritually healthy and creative has been for a century or more under attack …

He then quotes Morris as saying (for his quotes, see here):

If the system of flood geology can be established on a sound scientific basis … then the entire evolutionary cosmology, at least in its present neo-Darwinian form, will collapse. This in turn would mean that every anti-Christian system and movement (communism, racism, humanism, libertarianism, behaviorism, and all the rest) would be deprived of their pseudo-intellectual foundation.”

It [evolution] has served effectively as the pseudo-scientific basis of atheism, agnosticism, socialism, fascism, and numerous faulty and dangerous philosophies over the past century.

The popularity of creationism — roughly half of the people in the United States support the view that the world was created 6,000 or so years ago — attests to widespread support for these criticisms.

It is noteworthy how readily the New Atheists — comprehendingly or not — play the creationist’s script. They too make no distinction between scientific and metaphysical views about the purposes and origins of the universe as described by evolution. Simply put, they are the other side of the same coin.

Intelligent Design

The backwardness of creationism — the idea that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, its appeal to literal interpretations of Bible derived from American fundamentalism, and its lack of scientific sophistication — led to the emergence of the much more sophisticated Intelligent Design movement (see here and here.)

Intelligent Design also maintains the view that evolution is a materialistic pseudo-science — albeit with critiques that are much more sophisticated — but it has dropped relying on literal interpretations of the Bible (for example, the idea that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, the emphasis on Christian fundamentalism) and put in place a much broader perspective on divine creation that embraces views from the world’s major religions. And it has brought aboard a number of very capable thinkers, writers, polemicists, publicists, and scientists into its ranks, as can be seen by a brief look at the website of its main institutional home, the Discovery Institute and the Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

[One of their senior fellows is David Berlinski, a self-described "maverick intellectual" and Jewish agnostic known for his popular and informative books on mathematics and his witty, informed, and bitingly sharp iconoclasm. In my opinion, he is must-read on any topic he chooses to write about.]

Much of the impact and success of the intelligent design movement can be attributed to the influence of Phillip Johnson, the UC Berkeley law professor, legal thinker, and now prolific author of a number of books, articles, and lecture tours focusing on criticisms of Darwinism. His legalistic analysis of Darwinism, Darwin on Trial, is one of the founding texts of intelligent design and a widely influential best seller. Marla Freeman, interviewing Johnson in 1997 for the San Francisco Chronicle, writes that “Johnson’s central argument is that Darwinism rests on faulty logic and flawed evidence … such as fossil records with gaping holes.” She continues:

More important, he says, the theory is based on the philosophy of naturalism, which includes the assumption that the physical world is all that exists. Darwin, he notes, attributes “randomness” to the universe and, it troubles him, that in doing so, makes “purposeless” the only acceptable scientific explanation for existence.

For a fair and informative interview with Johnson — an articulate and persuasive thinker — see the PBS NOVA interview with him called Defending Intelligent Design.

The Discovery Institute — a well-funded think-tank led by savvy and seasoned political and technology industry veterans — is the main institutional home of intelligent design. William Dembski and Michael Behe are their best known scientists and spend their time looking for scientific evidence of intelligent design. [Because such evidence would be tantamount to a valid scientific proof of the existence of an otherwise unknowable God, the success of such a venture is highly doubtful.] Its central focus is perhaps best represented in the controversial Wedge Strategy outlined in the Wedge Document. The focus is on materialism:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Agree with it or disagree with it, it is a powerful statement of religion and faith-based opposition to secular values that claim to be — but aren’t — based on science.

Summary

Creationism — and Intelligent Design — are two highly influential movements that attribute much of what is wrong in our modern world to materialistic philosophies and evolutionary science. The solution they propose is to develop and teach alternative approaches — “creation” science and/or Intelligent Sesign — alongside standard evolution. In effect, they propose to teach religious views cloaked in the language of science as an antidote to materialism. And, especially on the intelligent design side, they have developed highly articulate critiques of evolutionism (what I call the secular creation myth) which they confuse with — and convolve with — evolution.

The response of the defenders of evolution has been — in the main — to engage in exactly the same conflation of myth and science as the creationist and intelligent design folks, but apparently with much less awareness of what they are doing. The result is an escalating stand-off — and a long running series of major battles — in the war of science and religion.

Clearly, it is time to find ways bring some understanding into the picture, and I doubt that that is going to happen by repeatedly louder claims that secularism has won.

Next time, we will explore the topic further. What exactly does evolution say that causes its detractors and supporters alike to claim it to support purposelessness and to destroy religion?

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This is the 3rd in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he is author of Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution. He did work at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Feb 5, 2012. Know thyself! So goes the ancient Greek aphorism. Even if you don’t see your flaws, others do.

Consider evolutionism the worldview (as opposed to evolution, the science). To its supporters – including many in the scientific establishment – it is a scientifically informed understanding of the world. To some philosophers of science, it is a substitute religion (see, for example, the 1st blog in this series). To American evangelicals, it is secular ideology and its flaws are not only readily apparent but have debilitating consequences. American evangelicals have responded to those flaws by rejecting evolutionism and by rejecting evolution.

A word about nomenclature. By evolution, I mean the extraordinarily wonderful and successful science of evolution, now sometimes called the modern evolutionary synthesis. By evolutionism, I mean the ideological worldview derived from evolutionary thought. Michael Ruse, in Is Evolution a Secular Religion? describes this as a “secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world’s major problems, from racism to education to conservation.”

“What if?”

What if secular thinkers – biologists, educators, media folk, scientists, and leaders of thought in general – were to fully grasp the difference between evolution – the science – and evolutionism – the secular quasi-religion?

What if evangelicals and their leaders were to separate the two in their minds, and teach that there was a distinction?

Wouldn’t this go an incredible distance towards eliminating the divisiveness, the mutual distrust, even hatred and contempt, that the two sides hurl at each? Wouldn’t it start the healing of this enormous divide, this debilitating conflict of science and religion that is polarizing our country?

But for this to happen, there needs to first be an understanding of the role that social Darwinism – a source of horrific evil in the first half of the 20th century – played in bringing about creationism (and intelligent design, its most recent update). This is the topic of today’s blog.

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is the dark side of evolutionary thought, little spoken of and barely taught in school. So it is vaguely understood, as are its relationships to the horrors of 20th century civilization. But you cannot understand creationism – or even such things as the depth of popular anger against abortion, contraception, and family planning – without knowing about it. So, a short historical introduction from a distinguished historian.

Daniel Kevles is a leading American historian of science and author of In the Name of Genetics, the standard introduction to the American eugenics movement – a central component of early 20th century social Darwinism in the United States. The following is excerpted from In The Name of Darwin, an overview of social Darwinism and eugenics on the PBS evolution website:

[Social Darwinism emerged] in the late 19th century, a period in which notions of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were popular. At the time, a growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian analogies of “survival of the fittest” into social argument.

Daniel Kevles

In the United States, eugenics was the primary manifestation of social Darwinism.

The word “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as he put it, getting rid of its “undesirables” while multiplying its “desirables” – that is, by encouraging the procreation of the social Darwinian fit and discouraging that of the unfit.

Many social Darwinists insisted that biology was destiny, at least for the unfit, and that a broad spectrum of socially deleterious traits, ranging from “pauperism” to mental illness, resulted from heredity.

Eugenicists [in the United States] promoted the passage of eugenic sterilization laws that disproportionately threatened lower-income groups. The laws and programs they fostered supplied a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the Holocaust.

Social Darwinism reached its apogee in Germany. There, Darwin’s thought was popular and culturally influential from shortly after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859). Social Darwinism, initially taken as support for laissez faire competition between individuals, developed into ideas of collectivist competition between groups of people, races and nations, and into “scientific racism.” Here is how the historian Richard Weikart describes it in his The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany, 1859-1895:

In its early phase Social Darwinism served primarily as a justification for ideas of laissez faire, since it stressed individualist competition. Later in the nineteenth century, however, advocates of imperialism, racism, and eugenics began relying on Darwinian arguments. This second phase of Social Darwinism emphasized a collectivist struggle and arose in conjunction with progressivism.

Haeckel (left) and Assistant

Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), the influential German biologist (and “naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist”) was the leading promoter of Darwinism in Germany. It was Haeckel’s embrace of polygenism, the idea that “human races evolved independently and in parallel with each other,” a concept contrary to Darwin’s thinking, that most successfully captured the German view of their own racial superiority. Wikipedia describes his view as follows:

Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction. Haeckel claimed that Negros have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negros are related to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes. … Haeckel also believed Negros were savages and that Whites were the most civilised.

Thinkers ranging from Hannah Arrendt (one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century) to Ian Kershaw (the author of numerous volumes on Hitler and the 3rd Reich) are in unanimity about the importance of social Darwinism in the development of Nazism and its pursuit of the final solution we know as the holocaust. But note, they almost uniformly make the same distinction that I am arguing for, namely that evolution – the science – is not the cause of atrocities committed in its name. Rather, it is the emergence of ideologies where Darwinist thought played a formative role as a “narrative” about the nature of things that are the cause of these problems.

William Jennings Bryan and the Origins of Creationism

William Jennings Bryan (1860 -1925) – the populist, liberal Democrat, fighter for women’s suffrage, secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and three time Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States – is the unlikely instigator of modern American creationism.

Of course there is more to the picture than William Jennings Bryan (for an excellent and complete overview, see The Creation-Evolution Debate: Historical Perspectives). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the conditions that led to beginning of creationism as including

1. The rise of literalist interpretations of the Bible, leading to the need to take science into account,
2. The harnessing of enthusiasm created by successful evangelical lobbying for the prohibition of alcohol,
3. The growth of the public school system and the consequent collision of evolution education with evangelicalism,
4. The rise of new evangelical currents of thought, especially the 12 volumes of the Fundamentals published from 1910 to 1915, and
5. “The identification of evolution — Darwinism particularly — with the militaristic aspects of Social Darwinism, especially the Social Darwinism supposed embraced by the Germans in the First World War.”

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial

But it took William Jennings Bryan – the man of action – to create a movement that was successful at stopping the teaching of evolution in public schools. And it was Bryan who won the famous Scopes trial (1925).

Bryan believed, Wikipedia writes, that “a materialistic account of the descent of man through evolution undermined the Bible.” He also saw “Social Darwinism as a great evil force in the world promoting hatred and conflicts, especially the World War.” At his instigation, several American states passed laws against the teaching of evolution.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After the Scopes trail, the teaching of evolution was expunged from high school curricula in most American states, to return only after the Sputnik scare of the late 1950s triggered an emphasis on science education.

But the price paid for this was very high, and we are still paying it. The national press turned the Scopes trial into a media circus, viciously lampooning Bryan, his supporters, and the evangelical movement. As a consequence, evangelicalism and fundamentalism retreated from the public eye – boiling in anger – until the 1960s when it supported full-fledged creationism theories. This anger – and the distrust of evolution and its supporters – is stronger than ever, even though fundamentalism and evangelicalism have gone on achieve victory after victory, spreading all over the world and becoming a major force in American politics.

Next week, we review the evangelical critique of evolution and modern secular thought. Our aim in doing so is to encourage the search, along lines consistent with the Baha’i teachings on the unity of science and religion, for a common ground between evangelical views and secular understandings of evolution and evolutionism.

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This is the 2nd in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he is author of Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution. He did worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Feb 5, 2012. Science is not an undivided good – it has torn our world apart.

Lethal weaponry – the heritage of centuries of sustained scientific effort – continues its rapid pace of development. Science and technology industries continue to pollute, except now they do it in China or India. Energy and carbon production continues to grow, as does the resulting global warming, the threat of rising sea levels, the destruction of vast swathes of our environment, and the accompanying massive social disruption.

But none of these seems to have had the social and psychological impact – direct, emotional, disruptive, and highly divisive – of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A New Series of Blogs

This week, we start a series of blogs addressing the origins and impact of the conflict between evolution and religion while exploring the consequences for the relationship between science and religion. We will also bring into play the Baha’i teachings on the unity of science and religion. The aim is to understand the threads that make up the conflict of evolution and religion with the goal of seeing what can be done to reduce or eliminate their negative impact and to explore the possibilities of the emergence of something good from the seeming debacle.

We start by exploring American public opinion about evolution, followed by the surprisingly bitter response to that opinion on the part of some scientists, and finally entertain the idea that evolution is frequently taken as secular religion.

Want to contribute? Please get in touch.

What Americans Believe About Evolution

Polls tell us that Americans are divided into warring camps over evolution, and that the conflict it engenders spills over into the political sphere, very likely intensifying Washington’s political paralysis.

The Pew Research Center – a leading non-partisan public opinion research organization in the United States – surveyed American opinions on evolution in 2009. They present their results in Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media, reporting that 31% of Americans reject all ideas about evolution, even those that include guidance by a supreme being. Here is how they describe their results:

A majority of the public (61%) says that human and other living things have evolved over time, though when probed only about a third (32%) say this evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” while 22% say “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.” Another 31% reject evolution and say that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Another poll conducted by the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell reported in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us describes belief in evolution as strongly anti-correlated with belief in religion. The more religious you are, the less likely you are to accept evolution:

Americans’ attitudes on evolution are also sharply divided by religiosity. Less than 2 percent of the most religious Americans believe that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life but God had no part in this process,” compared to 45 percent of the least religious. Over three quarters of the most religious reject evolution altogether, and believe instead that God created human beings less than ten thousand years ago.

This conclusion is corroborated by the Pew poll described above and the polls by the Gallup organization (see On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution). (For an extended discussion of polls on the topic, see Wikipedia’s excellent Level of Support for Evolution.)

The Pew Research Center poll makes it clear that the divisiveness over evolution spills over into the political arena and to other topics like climate change, energy policy, stem cell research, and animal testing.

Interestingly, other polls show that divisiveness over evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that those who are religious are opposed to science. Apparently, it only means that evolution “feels wrong”. For a fascinating discussion on this, see Science and Religion: A False Divide by John H. Evans, a sociologist at UC San Diego and Belief in Evolution Boils Down to a Gut Feeling by David Haury and colleagues from Ohio State.

Taking Sides: Creationism as Blind Faith vs. Evolution as Secular Ideology

Where, we must ask, does this division of opinions come from?

We’ll explore this in depth in this series of blogs. But, for now, lets briefly explore how some scientists react to the American rejection of evolution. They do so in ways that can be surprisingly vehement.

“The Visigoths Are At The Gate”

Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement is a recent anthology of articles against intelligence design (ID), the weapon of choice wielded by those hoping to undermine evolutionary science. Edited by John Brockman, it features a who’s who list of the best and the brightest, including Steven Pinker, Scott Atran, Lee Smolin, Stuart Kaufman, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and many others.

Brockman describes the dangers of Intelligent Design in tones of comical overkill:

Religious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of “intelligent design,” by elbowing its way in the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long.

Moreover, intelligent-design imperils American dominance in science and in so doing presents the gravest of threats to the American economy, which is driven by advances in science … There are examples in history of the collapse of great civilizations. There is no particular reason that the United States should be exempt from historical forces. The Visigoths are at the gates. Will we let them in?

The sense of hysteria and cluelessness of this introduction is frequently echoed in the pieces in the anthology. Even though the arguments about evolution are well-reasoned and not even wrong, they invariably miss the point entirely (as well as disparaging the intelligence and morals of anybody who lacks a pulpit of scientific authority). The assumption is that the issue is about science, when it is really about how science is interpreted materialistically as a secular counterpart to religion and its creation myths.

“Evolution as a Religion”

Is evolution a religion? It can be, according to two of its most distinguished students.

The English philosopher Mary Midgley – whom The Guardian (one of Britain’s leading newspapers) describes as “the foremost scourge of scientific pretensions in this country” – warns against the dangers of taking evolution as a secular faith (scientism). In Evolution as a Religion, she writes:

[W]e need to avoid extending the confidence which is due to the central, well-established findings of the sciences to a vast area which has only an imaginative affinity with them, an area where only the name and trappings of ‘science’ are present. The attitude sometimes called scientism – a general veneration for the idea of science detached from any real understanding of its methods – is at present extremely powerful.

Of secular faith, she writes:

[New secular faiths] are hungrily seized on by people whose lives lack meaning. When this happens, there arises at once, unofficially and spontaneously, many elements which we think of as characteristically religious. We begin, for instance, to find priesthoods, prophecies, devotion, bigotry, exaltation, heresy-hunting and sectarianism, ritual sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin, absolution and salvation, and the confident promise of a heaven in the future.

The two greatest secular faiths, she writes, are Marxism and evolutionism:

Marxism and evolutionism, the two great secular faiths of our day, display all these religious-looking features. They have also, like the great religions and unlike more casual local faiths, large-scale ambitious systems of thought, designed to articulate, defend and justify their ideas – in short, ideologies.

Michael Ruse, the leading philosopher of biology of the day, says much the same thing in Is Darwinism a Religion? in The Huffington Post:

Is evolution, Darwinian evolution in particular, a religion? To sound like the philosopher that I am, it all depends on what you mean by “religion.” …

I don’t think believing that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection (his version or today’s version) commits you to religious belief. I think that if, as I myself would, you extend the scope of the theory to an understanding of knowledge acquisition and justification and the same for morality — evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics — then it can act as a religion substitute or alternative. It gives you a world picture that some people, starting with me, find entirely satisfying.

In Is Evolution a Secular Religion? (in Science), he writes:

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world’s mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world’s major problems, from racism to education to conservation.

So, one of the things that Brockman and his collection of scientific eminences seems to be missing entirely is the extent to which evolution is used – or should I say misused? – as a substitute religion. They can see that evangelicals are using religion as a substitute for science, but apparently they can’t see that they are using science as a substitute for religion.

It turns out that the folks on the evangelical side see this all too clearly. This is what we will explore in next week’s blog.

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This is the 1st in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he is author of Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution. He did worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Jan 29, 2012. This week features the 15th blog – and the last – in our Religion, Science, and Global Civilization series.

We’ve covered a lot of ground. Starting with description of the world’s outstanding problems as described by some of the world’s most prominent thinkers, we’ve progressed through to a description of – and elaboration on – the Baha’i principles of the harmony of science and religion and what these principle mean for addressing those problems.

This final blog describes how some of the Baha’i ideas about the harmony of science and religion have been developed in the international Baha’i community. It also briefly overviews the themes of the Religion, Science, and Global Civilization series.

Next week, I start a new blog series surveying views on religion and evolution and how the Baha’i teachings approach the topic. I’m hoping to have guest blogs on the topic – contact us if you want to participate.

Some Additional Comments on How The Worldwide Baha’i Communities Approaches Science and Religion

Science Religion, and Solving the Problems of Mankind

One of the most thorough analyses of the implications of the Baha’i teachings for science and religion is in The Prosperity of Humankind, a statement by the Bahá’í Office of Public Information released in 1995. It describes, among other things, how science and religion can work together to address the world’s needs.

Clearly, it is important to expand scientific activity to the benefit of all:

A central challenge, therefore — and an enormous one — is the expansion of scientific and technological activity. Instruments of social and economic change so powerful must cease to be the patrimony of advantaged segments of society, and must be so organized as to permit people everywhere to participate in such activity on the basis of capacity.

Accomplishing this expansion requires an “intensifying dialogue between science and religion:”

Since, then, the challenge is the empowerment of humankind through a vast increase in access to knowledge, the strategy that can make this possible must be constructed around an ongoing and intensifying dialogue between science and religion. It is — or by now should be — a truism that, in every sphere of human activity and at every level, the insights and skills that represent scientific accomplishment must look to the force of spiritual commitment and moral principle to ensure their appropriate application.

 Accomplishing this also requires learning to think “in terms of process,” something that is taught by science:

Another capacity that science must cultivate in all people is that of thinking in terms of process, including historical process; however, if this intellectual advancement is to contribute ultimately to promoting development, its perspective must be unclouded by prejudices of race, culture, sex, or sectarian belief.

Religion – however – is required if the capacity building and wealth generation that successful implementation of scientific and technological progress creates is to benefit everyone, not just the top 1%:

Similarly, the training that can make it possible for the earth’s inhabitants to participate in the production of wealth will advance the aims of development only to the extent that such an impulse is illumined by the spiritual insight that service to humankind is the purpose of both individual life and social organization.

Applying science in religion:

Another thorough analysis of how the Baha’i Faith views the relationship between science and religion is to be found in the writings of Paul Lample, a sociologist who has been elected to the Universal House of Justice in Haifa. In Revelation and Social Reality, a book that can be downloaded for free from the web, he writes about the role of science in understanding the truths of religion.

The essential nature of reality is beyond our understanding, he writes. But the truths of Revelation – which are what the founders of the world’s great religions teach as guidance for humanity – are designed to be understood and to drive growth and progress, both individual and social. Our valid understandings of these truths – what Lample calls “justified knowledge – are mutable and must be refined again and again through action and by testing “against the brute facts of physical reality”:

The mutable knowledge that constitutes the horizon of human comprehension is continually tested against the brute facts of physical reality, through the understanding and methods of the scientific community, and against the verses of Revelation, through the understanding and methods of the religious community. Truth, at this third level, is justified knowledge, and represents humanity’s best insight into the universe and Revelation. Such truths are subject to alteration or refinement over time as more profound understandings that encompass and transcend previous notions emerge through practical action to shape society.

In science, understanding is modified on the basis of facts. And recognizing the limitations of scientific models is important:

In science, if a sufficient number of observed facts stand in contradiction to a theory held in the body of scientific knowledge, then that theory may require modification or may be rejected. If certain scientific methods produce outcomes that conflict with reality, then those methods are in question and are likely to be discarded or modified, or at least used only within the limited range of circumstances in which they produce valid results.

The same holds true for religion:

The same principle holds true for religion. Methods of individual interpretation or action must produce understanding and practices that correspond to the authoritative statements of the text. The purpose of study and scholarly activity that explores the Revelation is, therefore, to improve understanding and practice … Care must be exercised that personal interpretation does not distort, deny, or contend with the Word …

The fullest implication of this is that truth is arrived at by continued process of consultation, action, and reflection:

Learning in this sense is not limited to study and evaluation. It comes about in combination with action. The believers must regularly engage in consultation, action, reflection—all in the light of the guidance inherent in the teachings of the Faith. Such a learning process can occur in a very simple manner at the village and local level, but with greater sophistication by national agencies and institutions. At the international level, it calls for a higher degree of conceptualization, one that takes account of the broader processes of global transformation …

Summarizing: Religion, Science, and Global Civilization Blog

Let me end by giving a brief summary of the main themes in the Religion, Science, and Global Civilization blog series.

The traditional view of science and religion as in conflict – while perhaps understandable from a historical perspective – is inadequate to address the problems of the future.

These future problems include those caused by unrestrained evolutionary impulses – including greed and aggression – and prevent us from addressing our problems. Unresolved, they raise the distinct possibility of a calamitous end to the modern world (through war or by other means). Economists see problems deriving from dramatically growing populations and long-term environmental degradation (including global warming and the rise of oceans) and an alarming inequality in access to opportunities and the advantages of education. Visionary politicians recognize the existence – and the preponderance – of these problems and the need to address them, but appeal to traditional secular values as the means to their solution.

Science – and secularism – are powerful, but by themselves they are inadequate to the challenge. Religion – the other most potent force in human life – is needed if we are to successfully solve them.

The remainder of the blogs outline and expand on the importance of using both science and religion.

Next

Next week, I start a new blog surveying views on evolution, including those found in the Baha’i teachings.

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This is the 15th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Jan 22, 2012. We don’t usually think of science as playing a role in religion. This is because – I think – we are so strongly influenced by the secular spirit of the age. Religion, we think, is about immaterial truths – morals, ethics, and related kinds of things. Science is concerned, we tend to think, with nature.

Stephen J. Gould – the science writer, paleontologist, and evolutionary biologist – argued this point in Rocks of Ages, his influential book on science and religion. Gould describes science and religion as two non-overlapping “magisteria,” one “our drive to understand the factual character of nature (the magisterium of science)” and the other “our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).” (For an insightful critique of Gould’s perspective, see Ursala Goodenough’s review of Rocks of Ages in the American Scientist.)

The Baha’i writings don’t endorse the clear distinction between science and religion that Gould postulates. My reasons for concluding this are that:

1. Science and religion both draw on the same source – the intellect – for their understandings.
2. Religion requires science, its methods, and its understandings it is to avoid straying into superstition and thus becoming a source of contention, disunity and various problems.
3. The ends of religion – including those of being true to its own teachings, maintaining and organizing its activities, maintaining strong communities, and transforming the world – require a command of science, its techniques, and its means of seeking out truth.

In this blog, we explore points 1 and 2.

Baha’i Perspectives on Why Religion Should use Science

Religion and Intellect

The Baha’i Writings describe our intellect as God’s greatest gift to humanity. According to`Abdu’l-Baha (as quoted in Paris Talks):

Intellect is, in truth, the most precious gift bestowed upon man by the Divine Bounty. …God gave this power to man that it might be used for the advancement of civilization, for the good of humanity, to increase love and concord and peace. …Study the sciences, acquire more and more knowledge.

Clearly, engaging in religion without using the intellect is to fail to use God’s most precious gift to man. Or, to put in another way, religion without science is like belief without thought. Again `Abdu’l-Baha:

We may think of science as one wing and religion as the other; a bird needs two wings for flight, one alone would be useless. Any religion that contradicts science or that is opposed to it, is only ignorance — for ignorance is the opposite of knowledge. Religion which consists only of rites and ceremonies of prejudice is not the truth. Let us earnestly endeavour to be the means of uniting religion and science. …Whatever the intelligence of man cannot understand, religion ought not to accept. Religion and science walk hand in hand, and any religion contrary to science is not the truth.

It follows that true religion and science are not in contradiction:

There is no contradiction between true religion and science. When a religion is opposed to science it becomes mere superstition: that which is contrary to knowledge is ignorance. How can a man believe to be a fact that which science has proved to be impossible? If he believes in spite of his reason, it is rather ignorant superstition than faith. The true principles of all religions are in conformity with the teachings of science.

Abdu'l-Bahá

Religion Without Science

What happens when religion falls away from science?

A powerful statement of the Baha’i understanding of what happens is the “Fourth Principle – The Acceptance of the Relation Between Religion and Science,” again in Paris Talks. Speaking in 1911, `Abdu’l-Baha criticized all of the religions of the day as out of harmony with science and thus falling into superstitious practices and clinging to outward forms, not inward truths:

All religions of the present day have fallen into superstitious practices, out of harmony alike with the true principles of the teaching they represent and with the scientific discoveries of the time. Many religious leaders have grown to think that the importance of religion lies mainly in the adherence to a collection of certain dogmas and the practice of rites and ceremonies! Those whose souls they profess to cure are taught to believe likewise, and these cling tenaciously to the outward forms, confusing them with the inward truth.

When religion falls away from science, the result is “discord, hatred, and disunion” and leaders of thought understandably conclude that science and religion are in conflict with science:

Now, these forms and rituals differ in the various churches and amongst the different sects, and even contradict one another; giving rise to discord, hatred, and disunion. The outcome of all this dissension is the belief of many cultured men that religion and science are contradictory terms, that religion needs no powers of reflection, and should in no wise be regulated by science, but must of necessity be opposed, the one to the other.

The unfortunate effect of this is that science has drifted apart from religion, and religion has become a mere blind and more or less apathetic following of the precepts of certain religious teachers, who insist on their own favourite dogmas being accepted even when they are contrary to science. This is foolishness, for it is quite evident that science is the light, and, being so, religion truly so-called does not oppose knowledge.

 `Abdu’l-Baha can very much sound like a new atheist condemning religion for being out of touch with science:

We are familiar with the phrases ‘Light and Darkness’, ‘Religion and Science’. But the religion which does not walk hand in hand with science is itself in the darkness of superstition and ignorance. Much of the discord and disunion of the world is created by these man-made oppositions and contradictions.

Look around and see how the world of today is drowned in superstition and outward forms!

Some worship the product of their own imagination: they make for themselves an imaginary God and adore this, when the creation of their finite minds cannot be the Infinite Mighty Maker of all things visible and invisible! Others worship the sun or trees, also stones! In past ages there were those who adored the sea, the clouds, and even clay!

Abdu’l-Baha in Paris

Acknowledging the same problems that the new atheists attack, `Abdu’l-Baha then points out that “the strength and power of religion must not be doubted because of the incapacity of these persons to understand.”

Today, men have grown into such adoring attachment to outward forms and ceremonies that they dispute over this point of ritual or that particular practice, until one hears on all sides of wearisome arguments and unrest. There are individuals who have weak intellects and their powers of reasoning have not developed, but the strength and power of religion must not be doubted because of the incapacity of these persons to understand.

A small child cannot comprehend the laws that govern nature, but this is on account of the immature intellect of that child; when he is grown older and has been educated he too will understand the everlasting truths. A child does not grasp the fact that the earth revolves round the sun, but, when his intelligence is awakened, the fact is clear and plain to him.

It is impossible for religion to be contrary to science, even though some intellects are too weak or too immature to understand truth.

The solution is for science and religion to walk together:

If religion were in harmony with science and they walked together, much of the hatred and bitterness now bringing misery to the human race would be at an end.

Consider what it is that singles man out from among created beings, and makes of him a creature apart. Is it not his reasoning power, his intelligence? Shall he not make use of these in his study of religion? I say unto you: weigh carefully in the balance of reason and science everything that is presented to you as religion. If it passes this test, then accept it, for it is truth! If, however, it does not so conform, then reject it, for it is ignorance!

He urges us to put our beliefs in harmony with science:

God made religion and science to be the measure, as it were, of our understanding. Take heed that you neglect not such a wonderful power. Weigh all things in this balance. 

Put all your beliefs into harmony with science; there can be no opposition, for truth is one. When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science, then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and struggles — and then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God.

Conclusions

The Baha’i Writings, as the quotes above clearly show, demand that religion be brought into harmony with science. Failing to do so brings disaster. Doing so brings a “great unifying, cleansing force.” The Baha’i standards can seem impossibly high…but we can see clearly that they are the way to go.

Next

Next week, we describe some aspects of how the worldwide Baha’i community is working to bring religion into harmony with science.

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This is the 14th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Jan 15, 2012. We have been arguing that science and religion must work together if the peoples of the world are to successfully address the mounting set of problems that they face.

But if this is to happen, religion must advance, progress, and continually develop. This in turn implies that science will play an increasing vital role in religion.

Religion, Blind Faith, and an Unthinking Attitude 

Shanghai Skyline

Many doubt that religion will play an important role in the world’s future, pointing to continuing progress in the material sphere. Religion cannot compete with this, they think. The stunning success of China’s industrial development and the rapid growth of her cities is exhibit #1 that proves the sustained vitality of science, technology, and modern secular practices of development.

Material progress, we reply, is clearly a central component of the unity of science and religion. If science and technological development were not to bring about such progress, why would we want it? But the rise of science and modern technology has not just simply brought benefits. It has also brought the unbridled destructiveness of modern warfare, has created massive environmental degradation including global warming and the rise of sea levels, has impoverished great numbers of the world’s peoples, and it has fragmented lives and destroyed countless communities through the rapid and unceasing pace of change and the periodic collapses it seems to necessitate. Material progress is part of the solution, it is true. But it has also created a set of problems so severe that they threaten our existence.

Max Weber

The Stronger Criticism …

The stronger criticism of religion lies elsewhere. The success of material progress in itself is not a proof that religion is invalid. Indeed, leading thinkers – for example, Max Weber in the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) and Robert Bellah in Tokugawa Japan: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan) – have argued for religion as a strong contributor to material and economic development in European and Japan respectively.

Rather, the real argument against religion is that religion is based on ignorance. It is – this argument goes – based on unreasoned faith and the unthinking acceptance of the dictates of religious leaders and tradition. It is shot through and through with superstition. In short, most people in the throes of religious belief don’t think.

The Answer …

But what if people “in the throes of religion belief” do think?  And what if they start thinking more and more? Clearly, religion is a moving target, and criticisms of religion by European philosophers two hundred years ago or by modern secularists yesterday are increasingly irrelevant in a world where science and learning are no longer the province of an educated few.

Al-Azhar University

And what about the future, both near term and far term?  Clearly, there is nothing – excepting lack of education – preventing the arts of thinking becoming a powerful force in the world’s religions. Given that the world’s religion have been the world’s leading educators for more generations in the past than most people can count, and given that the religions are still the leading educator in many parts of the world – and indeed, the founder of almost all of the world’s first universities – it is hardly farfetched to think of a renaissance of religious and scientific learning.

Science and the Renewal and Reformation of Religion

Lets look at the role that science can play in this renewal of religion.

Ruins of Nalanda University

Science, provided we think of it as more than just a narrowly technical exercise in restricted domains of inquiry, is the process of the systematic investigation of reality. Ideas are formulated and put into practice and the results are evaluated to correct and improve the ideas.

The process is dynamic. Knowledge gained by repeated iterations can grow quickly, especially when the process is done with the participation of people from diverse perspectives and backgrounds who share and discuss the results.  As the use of this dynamic scientific process accelerates and spreads in religion, it will work very effectively to eliminate superstition and cure blind adherence to unexamined belief.  It will also enhance the power and capabilities of communities everywhere to act in their own – and the world’s – best interests.

This kind of learning will also work to eliminate disunity between the diverse religious communities of the world. To a very large extent, interpretations of the teachings of the great religious leaders – prophecies and the like – are determined by such things as family upbringing, cultural backgrounds and a mix of received ideas from religious leaders and/or their critics. Crisis, disunity, and conflict are a frequent consequence, as such interpretations can differ widely and and people are often urged by their leaders to fight over them.

But when individuals, grass-roots groups, national and even international communities work to systematically increase understanding and learning through scientific means as described broadly here, then unworkable and unreasonable interpretations are more readily put aside, reducing or eliminating conflict and and making cooperation much easier. People, and groups — even those in conflict — will see thing directly with their own eyes, not through the eyes of dogma or ancient interpretations, enabling unity.

In short, the potential for religion to once again renew and revitalize itself is readily discernible if the means and methods of science are put into place.  When this takes place:

When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science …

the Baha’i Writings prophecy then that something unprecedented will happen:

then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and struggles — and then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God. (Abdu’l-Baha, Paris Talks, p. 142)

Next Week

Next week, we will explore aspects of the Baha’i perspective on the need for science as an integral part of religion.

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This is the 13th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Jan 8, 2012. Science and religion must work together if we – the peoples of the world – are to successfully address the mounting set of problems we face.

John Locke

Today’s blog – perhaps appropriate to the first of the new year – looks at claim above as a story of new beginnings. And for most of us it is, even if we have long viewed science and religion as partners.

We have either been too steeped in modern secular culture’s claim to universality and its seeming continued ascendency, or we have been too caught up in keeping our bearings in a rapidly changing world, or we have been fighting the good fight in the name of God and His Truth and have not recognized that the ground has shifted.

The World’s Serious Problems and Science and Religion Solutions

Previously blogs in this series surveyed prominent world leaders’ views on what must be done if our world is to survive and prosper [see Religion, Science, and Global Civilization #11 or more detailed descriptions in Religion, Science, and Global Civilization #3 [RSGC#3], RSGC#4, RSGC#5, and RSGC#6]. Table I is the short list of problems they claimed as the most serious.

Other blogs in this series investigated steps to be accomplished if we are to solve the world’s most serious problems. These steps, either drawing on science, on religion, or on both, are summarized as a short list in Religion, Science, and Global Civilization #11 as well as described below in Table II.

Matching the Problems and the Steps Needed to Solve Them

In one sense, matching the problems we have described in Table I with the steps outlined in Table II is a straightforward exercise. Simply apply everything in Table II to all of the problems described in Table I. However, we are already making the classic mistake that all teachers of planning and entrepreneurship warn novices against – trying to address vastly huge problems as if they could be resolved simply.

So, back to our somewhat slow and drawn-out blogging process.  What we will do next is to take each of the world problems in Table I and show how each of the four steps in Table II applies to it, something we can now do systematically.This suggests that if we are to do justice to this task, there should be a separate series of blogs dedicated to it. Accordingly, we will set this task aside for the next series of blog and concentrate on finishing this series.

We have yet to adequately address the role of science in reforming and reviving religion -item D of Table II – and we will concentrate on that next.

Next Week

Next week, we will discuss how science can be brought to bear to address the need for renewal and reformation in religion if it is to expand its capabilities to deal with our needs for the future.

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This is the 12th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Dec 25, 2011. I have been arguing that science must be made available to everybody and that science and religion need to work together if we are to address the world’s problem. Anything short of this, I believe, will fall short of the task.

Below, I provide an abbreviated list of the reasons that we have discussed – and some we haven’t – for reaching this conclusion. In next week’s blog, we will apply them to world problems we identified earlier.

List of the Reasons Why We Need Science and Religion to Solve the World’s Problems

Last week, I wrote:

“The relationship of science and religion has gone nearly a full circle. Four hundred years ago they were in accord, two hundred years ago in conflict, and now the relationship is coming back to its starting point. Science and religion need to come into accord again if we are to realize the dreams of both for the future.”

To realize our dreams for the future, and to resolve the world’s problems, I believe that the following are necessary and necessarily involve both science and religion:

Universal Scientific Literacy: The inequalities in distribution of knowledge about science, its methods, and its use are a major contributor to the world problem’s. Religion can be one of the most effective ways to spread the benefits of science if it propagates science in populations and social groups around the world where it has influence.

When people’s lives are a plaything of external forces beyond their command or control – as is the case for most of the people in the world unreached by our modern information societies – then highly unequal development, social unrest, terrorism, political instability, warfare, and famine are the consequences. The “information divide’ between the “haves” and “have nots” of information technology are only a surface view of the underlying problem of lack of access to the knowledge and the knowledge-generating techniques of science.

Moral and Ethical Values: Systems of morals, ethical principles, and service to society are at the heart of any solution to the world’s problems. Religions are humanity’s age-old means for teaching what is moral, ethical, and right. They can – and must – play a key role in creating the will and impetus for change and maturation necessary for the needed advances to take place. Without that will, change will happen only through catastrophe.

Some thinkers, including Sam Harris (see, for example, his The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Value) think that science can determine moral values. In the main, science doesn’t create human values but illustrates them and illuminates their origins and the consequences of attempts to apply them. In doing so, it can help immensely in picking the priorities to be pursued and the means and methods to do so. But, in the grand picture, science only helps determine values when it leads to knowledge and wisdom. There is no data I know of that indicates scientists to excel over others in that department.

Transcending Materialism: Materialism means, in one sense, the need for more and more. I have 1300 sq. ft. house, I need a 2600 sq. ft. house and a BMW. I have an iPhone2, I need an iPhone4. Multiply this by 7 billion people and you have the current world economic system where continual growth in purchasing power per individual is often viewed as the only thing staving off world economic collapse. Clearly, such materialism is unsustainable.

But materialism is also a philosophy and ideology born of the European Enlightenment and rise of modern nationalism. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes it as the view that “that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.”

Without a recognition of the limitations of materialism both in its individual and philosophical aspects, it is hard to imagine an escape from the acquisitiveness and desire for power, money, and resources which the recent collapse of Wall Street and the current financial troubles in the European Union show to be an inescapable aspect of the modern world, one whose effects are so poorly understood by those dominated by its influence.

Most sciences – in fact all sciences not restricted to simple descriptions physical or chemical phenomena – must take into account the role and impact of human behavior. To the extent that underlying assumptions are materialistic, answers to important questions will also be materialistic. The famous computer engineer’s aphorism – GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) – describes this well provide we modify it to MIMO (Materialism In, Materialism Out). The future will need a fuller range of scientific answers that take into account our spiritual nature AND our material nature. In this regards, religion is a much needed corrective to current scientific practice.

Reformation of Religion: Missing so far in this series of blogs is a discussion of something I think absolutely important – that religion needs science and the scientific outlook  if it is to be relevant to the modern age and not just a source of conflict and disunity.

For example, even if we acknowledge that the arguments of the New Atheists are biased, extreme, and fundamentally unscientific, it does not follow that their criticisms – and the criticisms in the past of large segments of the world’s leaders of thought – are lacking in merit. Those criticisms, which we will turn to in weeks to come, include critiques of the antiquated hierarchical command structure of existing religions, its opposition to the developments and findings of science, its support of ancient and outmoded forms of government, its encouragement of superstition, and its opposition to social reform.

My list above, as abbreviated and incomplete as it is, shows the immensity of the tasks before us. But, it also yields an important result. It shows us that there is a way forward and that certain basic assumptions of the age of secularism and nationalism can be removed with extraordinarily positive effect.

These assumptions – including the ideas that religion is a barrier to progress, that science and religion are in conflict, and that reality is entirely material- serve as huge barriers to progress. Eliminating those assumptions – they are ingrained so it won’t be easy – opens the way to most if not all of the world’s people becoming part of the solution rather than part of the problem. It frees up huge amounts of resources and removes several of the major problems – including the exaltation of greed and the denigration of humility.

Next Week

Next week, we will apply our list to the world problems we identified earlier.

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This is the 11th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> “The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”

The Universal House of Justice

Dec 18, 2011. Last week, I blogged about how the role of science in society was changing. I illustrated those changes by discussing the decline of Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs, two industrial research labs that played an important role in scientific and industrial  development in the United States and Japan respectively in the 20th century.

I am using the example of the labs to help illustrate the Baha’i point of view that both science and religion are needed if the world is to advance:

“Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone!”

This week, I want to use the important lessons to be learned from Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs to elaborate on some of the future changes that need to take place if science is to become a “wing” of the bird of humanity that benefits all the people of the world.

Lessons To Be Learned

Both Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs were large – each had more than 10,000 employees – and both were the research and development organizations of national telecommunications monopolies. They epitomized the focused, wealth-building, centralized, and highly top-down form of science and engineering typical of the late 20th century.

The lessons that are to be learned from them and their decline – if I may recapitulate – include on one hand the power of concentrated scientific research, and on the other hand the limitations of concentrated control of the fruits of that research.

In the first case, massively concentrated scientific research of the type which these labs excelled at played an important role in 20th century scientific and technical development.  Bell Labs, for example, developed transistors, microwave and RF technologies, lasers, optical fibers, e-mail, and the precursors to the internet. These are the fundamental technologies of the 21st century.

NTT Labs played a similar developmental role in Japan, first helping create the giant electronics firms – NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba – that are at the core of the Japanese electronics industry.  Then, through NTT DoCoMo, playing a major role in the development of the modern cell phone industry.

But despite the wealth of scientific and technological productivity of these two labs, the benefits to society of much of their research was limited.  (The exceptions, of course, are transistors and lasers which – in effect – escaped from Bell Labs and grew rapidly into important technologies.)

It was only when the telecommunications monopolies – AT&T and NTT – that controlled the labs were broken apart that the telecommunications industry exploded with creativity and rapidly developed the new technologies that have lead to the cell-phone and internet technologies we see today – and with them the global information and communications networks that reach to all except the most remote part of the world today.

So the lesson is twofold: (1) concentrated research can create scientific and engineering advances that can change the world, and (2) scientific and engineering advances require new forms of social organization – the telephone monopolies of the 20th century were inadequate – if they are to proliferate and benefit large numbers of people.

The lesson for those with goodwill towards the whole of the world is, I submit, that the fruits of concentrated scientific development are real, and that focused scientific research – if successively and massively implemented – can create fundamental changes in how the world functions.

But, in the world that we live in today, scientific research focused on the real needs of the people of the world often does not take place and the mechanisms for implementation the potential fruits of such research are lacking. To echo the Occupy Wall Street crowd, the world is mainly structured for the material benefits of the “1%”.This is due, I think, to the lack of true religion and the concurrent rise of materialism:

“Should a man try to fly … with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.”

Universal Scientific Literacy

If we are to fully use the power of science, then it must be harnessed for the benefit of all.

This should be viewed as the next step in an ongoing  series of scientific revolutions  – and it is a step that is just dawning.  It includes the expansion of scientific literacy and the extension of the capacities of science to all the members of the world’s communities and all the members of their various component social groups.

When this happens, it will level the playing fields for all of the world’s peoples and allow them to take their destiny into their own hands. When this happens, science will belong to all.  It will more radically change the world than anything in the most fevered dreams of the most ardent revolutionaries of the past.

Truly, universal scientific literacy will be “power to the people”, for there is no greater power known than the power of the mind.

Changes in Social Organization

The other lesson to be drawn from the story of Bell Labs and NTT Labs is that the sharing of the benefits of science is determined by social organization. The fruits of the great scientific advances of these labs were only widely made available when monopoly control of the telecommunications industry was ended.

Similarly, if the fruits of the benefits of society are to be extended to all, there needs to be massive  shifts in the social organization of  world societies, much as there were massive shifts in the world’s telecommunications and internet industries.

If that shift is to extend to all corner’s of the globe and to all communities, that is an undertaking that our present forms of social organization – now seemingly incapable of maintaining even the strength of the world’s leading industrial democracies – are unprepared for and incapable of doing.

Here is my argument and a challenge. We have seen hugely increasing rates of change, both in technology and in the expectations of people everywhere. Now, the main benefits of those changes are the citizens of the world’s leading industrial nations, and to a lesser extent, citizens of resource-rich regions. (But of course benefits seem to be slipping away even as I write from most people in these countries – wealth and privilege is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.)  Real and needed social change, accordingly, must take place if the benefits of science are to be extended to all.  The challenge is to create opportunities for such change.

We have argued earlier – and quoted the Baha’i Writings as saying – that this requires religion to play a central role.  Here is the grand picture I want to paint:

• Four hundred years ago, the scientific revolution began as Islamic learning merged with European creative energies to explore the earth and the heavens and create unparalleled new technologies.
• Two hundred years ago, enlightened European thought labored to cast aside the world’s great religions, thinking them retrograde and an impediment to the world’s evolution.
• Now, we live in a time of unmatched material prosperity for some, and chaos and despair for most others. But, we stand on the brink of yet another world revolution promised by the growth of knowledge and the possibility of universal scientific literacy.
• The means to achieve that long promised new world is not science alone, it requires a rejuvenated and re-energized religion.
• We now know that the enlightenment rejection of religion was – to the extent that it saw religion as superseded by science – juvenile and ignorant. The circle has turned, and it is the ignorance and political baggage of the secular, nationalistic, materialistic heritage of two hundred years ago – and yes, many scientists – that impedes progress.
• The relationship of science and religion has gone nearly a full circle.  Four hundred years ago they were in accord, two hundred years ago in conflict, and now the relationship is coming back to its starting point. Science and religion need to come into accord again if we are to realize the dreams of both for the future.

Next Week

Next week, we will continue further our exploration of the coming together of science and religion.

…………………………

This is the 10th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.