Category Archives: philosophy - Page 5

The Consequences of Evolution

Posted by on September 2, 2010 4 comments

In the past couple of posts I’ve been talking about evolution, now I hope to wrap up this short series of posts.  I’ve mentioned the reasons that I think it’s the truth, but I’ve not really mused about the opposition.  It’s an interesting question, why do people shout so loudly about evolution?  It seems to me that it’s not just faith, but given the strident approach and the volume, I’m wondering if it runs a little deeper.

Why do I say that it’s not just faith?  Well, there are plenty of religious moderates for who evolution seems to coexist quite happily with their faith.  There are plenty of accommodations that can be made along the lines of “God started it all, evolution is just one of the tools he chose to use” and so on and so forth.  The thing is that all of this requires the understanding of the believer to change.  The believer needs to think about it, question, and then allow their personal theology to evolve.

Bingo.  That’s why the screaming.  Even for a moderate, evolution requires a reassessment of their beliefs, mental accommodations must be made.   This begins to shift the so-called “rock of faith”.  I keep talking about a shifting of the rock on which a religious faith is built, now I can start to illustrate a little more clearly what I mean.

Now … If I was a fundamentalist this sort of thing would keep me awake at night.  Let’s think about this in and I’ll invoke a question that I first saw on “Atheist Thought”, the site of an atheist writer from the Orkneys called Eric Stockton.

When  reality puts a spanner in the works of a dogmatic religious system, the adherents have a limited series of choices.  You can remain utterly fundamentalist and deny reality, but anyone who’s seen the courtroom scenes in “Inherit the Wind” knows how bad that makes you look.  Or, you go down the rabbit hole……

The question is “Given the words of Matthew ch 6, v5-6, how do you justify the practice of collective prayer and worship in church? “.  I’ve given the exact wording from the NIV below.

5. And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.

6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

OK, we have a contradiction between scripture and practise here.  Of course the question above could have been phrased “Given the overwhelming and ever increasing evidence for evolution.  Given the fact it produces the goods in both science and industry and is therefore beyond any reasonable doubt.  How do you justify the Adam and Eve story in Genesis?” But whichever, let’s take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes……

We have but 3 real choices:

1.  The religion’s founder was wrong. Our first option, this is the least acceptable as a religion based on the word of a mistaken founder simply won’t do.  What else was he wrong about? There’s not much else to be said there, it’s the nuclear option.

2.  The scripture was mis-reported / mis-transmitted. Again a fairly nuclear option, it means that there is absolutely no guarantee that any of the scripture is reliable.  I’ve covered this before in my essays, and in summary, I consider this a highly likely thing.

3.  It’s all open to interpretation.  This is the option I’ve seen used as the main answer to this problem it leads straight into “Cafeteria Christianity”.  Once you can interpret things anyway you please, the centre cannot hold.  Frankly, at this point it’s all over for any orthodoxy and fundamentalism bar the shouting.  You may as well simply do as you please, so what’s the point?

Given the above, I can see why Evolution has caused such a controversy.  It is indeed the wolf at the door of dogmatic religions.  I should point out that I see no threat to Paganism or some forms of Buddhism in Evolution, I also plan to move on from this now, I think I’ve said my piece.

Organise without Organising

Posted by on September 1, 2010 No comments

It’s been a bit of a bad day.  This morning I suffered what I can only describe as an anxiety attack, I’ve been doing too much.  So I returned to Tai Chi after a long hiatus, the class wasn’t on but a few other rogue students were there and we conversed and ran through the form.  I can recommend the practise of Taijiquan, especially if you’re studying Taoist writings.

Earlier today I was mulling things over on my lunch break.  With a little help from a friend, I decided part of the problem was not just that I was trying to do too much.  It’s that I was straight jacketed by my structures and methods.

My mind wandered into a few of the lessons I learned from Taoism and Tai Chi and I realised that the the lesson was there.  I was in the garden of a cafe and looking at a flower I remembered the Taoist teaching that things are self organising.

So, I thought, what does that mean for me?  Well, I think that the wise course is to organise to a point, but not be stifled by it.  Guidelines not rules, light sketches not heavy ink.  You get the picture.

But most of all, lots of room to manoeuvre to change and to flow.  Most of this will arise from the situation the moment, and like the flower in the cafe garden it will take a structure all its own.

If I use the Taijiquan principle of 4 ounces of force, and also simply yield to the moment, it will organise without needing organising.

I like that.  Maybe not such a bad day after all?

Evolution, not a Theory

Posted by on August 31, 2010 No comments

In a previous post I talked a little about Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.  I mentioned that the second episode covered Evolution and now I’d like to say a little more about my views on Evolution.

First, we have to clear something up, the term “Theory of Evolution”.  This is much used by its opponents to denigrate it with the words “it’s only a theory”.  On the surface, they would seem to have something, but looking deeper I have my doubts.

A Scientific Theory is an attempt to explain a series of observations.  It must be stated in such a way that it is testable and potentially could be disproved.  The following quote covers it pretty well:

“A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it’s an accepted hypothesis. ” [1]

It seems fair to say then that Evolution is certainly no mere hypothesis, Darwin’s ‘best guess’, but that there is evidence stacked up in favour of it.  Some of this is observations, resistance to antibiotics in bacteria and pesticide resistance in insects.  Our knowledge of Evolution has been used to make predictions in the fossil record, and also in the biotech industry. [2] [3]  Further to this, while some may still deny that species can arise through evolution;  Speciation, the arising of a separate species or sub species, has been directly observed. [4]

My third reference link below provides what I consider to be the killer blow in favour of Evolution, the thing that makes it quite plain that it is fact.  There are a number of practical applications, the implications of this are clear. Our use of our knowledge of Evolution has saved rare species, assisted in engineering, helped create antibiotics and more.

My question is; In light of this, scientific convention notwithstanding, how can Evolution now be viewed as anything other than solid fact?

References

[1] – http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

[2] – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html (see “Evolution has never been observed”, paragraph 3)

[3] – http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA215.html

[4] – http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html (more specifically, section 5)

Nursing the Dream of Vengeance

Posted by on August 26, 2010 No comments

I was thinking a little further on my comments in a recent post on faith healers and the strange way some folk will keep believing, even once they’ve been exposed to the truth.

While I was thinking, a memory rose up and attracted my attention.  On further thought, I realised that this phenomenon isn’t just found on the positive side of things. I started thinking about the way it can be much more blatantly negative.

I was remembering someone I knew a few years ago, he’d been mistreated during his school years and it transpired that he was nursing his grievance and dreaming of revenge.  A dream of going back and burning the place to the ground along with everyone who’d made his life a misery.  One day I pointed out the futility of this dream, only to be met with anger.  I’d thought I was helping, but obviously not.

At the time, I said nothing.  But looking back, it’s a little clearer now why this happened.  In a couple of my previous posts, I’ve shared my opinion that many people frame their life experiences in terms of their faith, and/or their surrounding society.  But some people must frame their experiences in terms of the bad things, especially during their formative years.  Thus they will always be (for example) the person who was bullied, and as much of who they are is framed in those negative terms, they cannot easily escape it for the reasons of investment I explained previously.  Even though it’s a negative mental landscape, it’s just that, their mental landscape.  To change it is to threaten part of their identity.

My advice from then still stands now though.  Our desires for revenge, especially over the long term, are based on the mental picture of the people / organisations that wronged us.  The longer the term, the more it’s a mental image than a concrete reality.  Why?  Read on….

A major point of Buddhism is impermanence, constant change.  This means that very quickly we are faced with the point that the target of our revenge no longer exists.  In the case of a school, the pupil and staff rosters change, the buildings, fittings and fixtures alter slowly over time.  So even a small number of years later, the target of the urge for revenge no longer exists!  But rather than this being something that leaves us tortured it gives us complete freedom, as exactly the same principle applies to ourselves.  Thus the person who suffered those wrongs no longer exists either, and so we are truly free.

Unable to see, or unwilling to?

Posted by on August 24, 2010 No comments

I’ve been slowly working my way through Carl Sagan’s book ‘The Demon Haunted World’.  It’s a great book and if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.

The chapter I’m reading concerns gullibility and specifically mentions a very revealing ruse involving an invented entity called “Carlos”.  The ruse was devised by the Australian “60 minutes” program with the assistance of James Randi.  It was intended to make a point about gullibility at all levels of society, and it succeeded spectacularly.  Parts of the media were drawn in, as was a section of the public.  Statements and literature were created and put out by Randi that made little sense, with glaring errors in them, and they passed without comment.

The part that interests me the most, is what happened when they admitted the deception; there was a small hardcore of people who still believed!  The most interesting thing we can do here is wonder why.  I mean it’s all been admitted, cards laid on the table plain as day, yet still a small number of people believed.  Why?

I think that it comes down to the level of investment that we have as individuals in these things.  A week or two ago, in my “Religion of Society” series I observed that people will defend their position automatically due to the level of emotional investment they have there.  This is true of societies and religions as these are the things you grew up in, they helped shape who you are, and your answers to life’s questions are framed in their context.  This would mean that a change in those areas could involve a lot of effort.  But why should faith healers and other practitioners of pseudoscience merit this level of attachment?

Perhaps here we should consider the role of delusion, the pseudosciences can offer a comforting alternative world view to the conventional.  Perhaps a faith healer’s miracle seems to affirm that God considers you worth healing, that your faith is strong enough?  The Spiritualists and Clairvoyants offer other forms of comfort; against death, the pain of loss and the seeming randomness of life.

These things are comforting, for sure.  But that doesn’t make them correct, in fact some of these things can (and do) prove fatal.  This is all one more reason that I think critical thought should be firmly on the school curriculum.

A Positive Definition

Posted by on August 17, 2010 No comments

I was reading an article on a web page that came to my attention courtesy of the Birmingham Humanists blog a few days ago. In it the author covered a few things, mainly related to Humanism and differences among some sub groups.  But while doing that, he mentioned the fact that we usually focus more on our differences than the things that we have in common.

What piqued my interest further was the mention of ‘pushing away’ as a process.  The idea was that the author had defined himself during his formative years as a Humanist by pushing away from elements of religion and superstition.  He then pointed out that we tend to carry this process over to people.

The author described his own growth into Humanism in these terms, he talked of the things he was pushing away from.  He then observed that many Humanists still do this, which helps to cause much fracturing in the community.  The whole thing put me in mind of “The Judean Peoples Front” and the “Peoples Front of Judea” in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

In my view the author was describing a Taoist style process of definition by negation.  In other words that’s when you define a thing by what it’s not.  The Tao itself tends to be defined in these terms, and as you’re tend to be thinking in terms of emptiness it’s a natural way to do it.

Defining a stance by negation might seem like allowing others to take the initiative, that Humanism can only be defined by it’s opposition to much of religious thought, but it isn’t necessarily the case.  Of course, the danger for Humanism in this is that we risk losing sight of the positive expression of our stance.  We know what we’re against, but what how well do we put across what we’re for?  Do Humanists risk becoming better known for haranguing believers than offering a better alternative to religious indoctrination?

My comment here is that definition by negation does not have to be seen as reactionary and negative.  I could say that I’m “against indoctrination” or I could say that I’m “for free thought”.  This goes deeper than spin, as expressing these things positively will build habits of thought that I feel will prove very beneficial and much more attractive.

The Religion of Society Part 4 – Finale

Posted by on August 15, 2010 No comments

Welcome to the final instalment of my essay on The Religion of Society. You can find previous parts on my essays page. I’m going to try and draw everything to a conclusion now and see what we have.

I think I’ve successfully made my point that there are a great many comparisons that can be drawn between a society and a religious system. The more interesting question is why.

It could I suppose be speculated that if the structure of a religion is divinely inspired, that the divine structures inspired those of society. I have to say that I’ve not seen any evidence of a divine inspiration in religion that sways me, so I would tend towards shelving this idea pending further evidence.

This leads to my own view. I think that both religions and societies have a common source, a source that can easily be seen by everyone. It’s in plain view, just look in the mirror. Human beings tend to form power hierarchies and have a tendency to follow a leader, form social structures and codify rules. We respond to incentives and avoid punishment, both systems follow this “carrot and stick” approach. There’s a pay-off for following the system. This also means that if something comes along to threaten the carrot (be it atheists or anarchists) then we attack to protect the pay-off. Not just for ourselves, but for those we care about.

Both systems do just that and inspire these sort of responses. Religion came first, but the growth of secular society came later with the divine element left out of the recipe as science subjected it to a withering hail of fire. My view on the future is that secular society will keep growing, it’s a view that seems backed up by the figures I’ve seen on the subject. I do, of course, write with a British perspective on these figures.

Drawing this to a close, I’d like to talk about things that have occurred to me since I wrote this essay. It occurs to me that this could all be viewed as tribalism, both systems could be said to be tribal, with leaders, followers, rules, social structures, etc. But that discussion is a bit big for this post, so maybe another time. Secondly, when I started writing this post, I realised I hadn’t discussed for corporations in all of this. But that too is something I will leave to another time and for your own reflections.