This response is dedicated to Richard Dawkins and his courageous book The God Delusion.
Imagine you and I are standing outside a theatre reading the marquee, trying to make a choice about which movie to see. You come across a movie you’re not familiar with called Spacetime. I mention I’ve seen the flick so you ask me what it’s about. I tell you “everybody dies in the end.”
“Oh, it’s a slasher flick,” you say.
“No, it’s a Bible story. God creates this universe with a garden and there’s this apple tree and…”
“But you said everybody dies in the end. That’s obviously a slasher flick. What other kind of movie has everyone die in the end?”
“Well, no, it’s more about science and evolution and the progress of species. There’s this guy Darwin and…”
“But everybody still dies in the end?”
“Yeah, but more people are born, and new animals are born and they evolve and…”
“They all die, too?”
“Well, yeah.”
“So it’s a stupid horror flick with a predictable ending. Sounds boring. Let’s see a comedy.”
“O.K.”
I could do my best to defend spacetime, but let’s face it, the plot of every human life since the dawn of existence ends the same way: everybody dies. Ditto for animals and plants. Not a single living thing remains alive since the earth was formed. Now whether that death is from natural causes or accidents, or disease or whatever, the ultimate story line is the same.
“A vast spectacle of loss,” I believe Sam Harris calls human life in The End of Faith. A bunch of people are born, a bunch of drama happens to them, then they all die.
Not exactly engaging screenwriting
If spacetime were a movie, how many times would you watch it? Every time a character came up on the screen the whole theatre audience would shout out, “Dead!” It’s like old episodes of Star Trek. You always knew the actors you had never seen before who beamed down to the planet with Kirk and Spock were toast.
The character Boone Carlyle in the television show Lost calls them “red shirts” because they usually had red uniform tops on.
Predictability doesn’t make for great drama. Yet along comes this evolution theory and suddenly people are all ga-ga about whether it proves God does or doesn’t exist. Aren’t we still watching the same, boring movie called spacetime? Hasn’t changed its plot in 13.7 billion years.
Talk about reruns.
People, animals and plants live, a bunch of stuff happens to them, then they die. Some of the evolutionary stuff that happens to them may alter the plot slightly for future generations.
But no matter how much species “advance” from the suffering of the previous generations, they all die, too.
Evolution: not nominated for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Let’s review some of evolution’s “accomplishments”:
• Modern Humans first arose as Homo Sapiens some 200,000 years ago in Africa. Evolution has been busy at work ever since making “adaptations” to our species and helping us “do better” in our environment. Yet:
• Humans can still die from eating a single peanut; yet my dog can chew on a dead squirrel with absolutely no effects.
• Humans can die from a single sip of rancid, bacteria-laced water; yet my dog can drink from the toilet.
• Most humans die after less than ten days without water; my lawn turned brown over the past several rain-free weeks then greened-up immediately after it rained.
• An infant can die from SIDS, even if it’s laid properly in a crib by a loving, careful mother
• Children are born with cleft palettes, heart defects, and other severe malformations, despite the fact that evolution has been hard at work on Homo Sapiens for 200,000 years.
The Spacetime Theme Park and its Customer Experience Specialist, Mr. Evolution
Imagine your family has owned a huge amusement park called Spacetime for generations upon generations. After 200,000 years of helping your guests become “more adaptable” to the park, still 16,000 children under age five attending the park today will die from malnutrition. And that many will die tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
How long would you make it in today’s business climate?
And when you went to court to defend yourself against the largest class-action lawsuit of all times, how long would the jury sit and listen as you detailed this “improvement process” called “evolution” that was slowly making all your guests more adaptable to your park. The opposing lawyer asks you for evidence to support your claim, and you say, “Well, after 200,000 years of improvements not everybody dies from eating peanuts, just some of my guests.”
Your lawyer is frantically waving at you, trying to get you to shut up.
When questioned further, you admit that yes, 16,000 children are going to die every day you’re open for business.
Your lawyer is now beside herself.
You go on. “And if not from malnutrition, maybe from Ebola or AIDS or hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, influenza…” You unfurl the list of all the possible ways your guests can die and it reaches the floor.
Your lawyer is now crawling under the table.
And yes, you admit, in the end, every single patron of your park will die from the effects of Spacetime.
Now your lawyer is on the floor curled up in the fetal position, slowly rocking back and forth.
Evolution: not exactly a varsity player
I appreciate all of evolution’s hard work, but let’s face it, it really sucks at its job. Our lives are a ludicrously fragile natural mellodrama ending in the same predictable outcome: we all die. Lightning. A bear. A lion. A mudslide. A tornado. Any of them can end our lives in an instant after 200,000 years of evolution working its magic.
That we die this way or that, after two minutes or 90 years isn’t all that exciting. Only our fixation on the details of the predictable march to death makes it interesting for us. The Buddha would say we are attached to the sense objects that cause suffering and change. Suffering and change; if there is a better three-word definition of evolution, I haven’t come across it.
We need to become non-attached to our suffering evolution in order to reach Nirvana.
The fact that some species 200,000 years from now will have some slight advantages doesn’t thrill me in the least. In fact, if I could, I would forward future humans an e-mail detailing what a radical failure evolution is in our day so they wouldn’t hold out any hope in this load of crap.
Gee, can you eat two peanuts without dying, Mr. Future Man? Do tell! Can you get stung by two bees without your throat swelling shut? Do tell!
Nature balancing itself by appropriately killing this or that plant, animal or human is not a compassionate act; it’s a serial murderer deciding who will die today in order to keep the plot line rolling along.
What mother on this planet would be comforted by the words, “Well, the death of your child helped eliminate weak genes from our collective evolutionary pool. Thanks for your contribution to the balance of nature.”
We’re trying to avoid our animal nature, why study it endlessly?
The Buddha’s Arrow: reductionism on the details of suffering equals procrastination.
One of the most cutting things you can say to someone is “You’re acting like an animal.” Out of control. Wholly irresponsible. Uncaring and unfeeling.
Evolution is the study of what humans are trying to avoid in themselves: pre-programmed animalistic behavior. The lowest assessment of our capabilities.
For the faithful, why would you look at this degrading process and say it proves God exists? You look at evidence of the one thing we’re trying to avoid in ourselves—pre-programmed animalistic behavior—and ascribe that “miraculous” process to God? It’s like looking at a zit on a teenager’s face—the one thing they’re trying to avoid the day before prom—and saying, “Yep, that proves it, God exists!”
Similarly how can the scientific among us look at evolutionary genetic programming and say it proves God doesn’t exist. Didn’t astronomer Carl Sagan say “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?” Has someone found a way around this logic I’m unaware of? (See question #7 for an extended discussion on why God “doesn’t” reveal Himself to us.)
Radio waves from space have flown through the very nose of Homo Sapiens for 200,000 years. Yet they weren’t discovered until the late 1800’s. So should we all along have been insisting they don’t exist? Science is one big, unending parade of discovering things we had no idea actually existed. Germs. X-rays. Sub-atomic particles. The list never ends. Sitting along that parade route drinking a beer, shouting, “Doesn’t exist! Doesn’t exist!” gets to be a pretty boring pastime.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Period. The correct response to the question of whether God exists, as far as science is concerned, is, “We have no evidence God exists.” Doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. Its one narrow framework of external-evidence-based observation that completely misses what humans want most from life, as Yehuda Berg details and as I discussed at length in question #7.
Unless someone can prove Sagan’s logic to be faulty, can we please move on?
We should avoid evolution like zebra-striped Zubaz:
it’s spiritual beings dressing up in tacky animal skins.
We get cut off in traffic and we try our best not to respond like animals. Stephen Covey sagely observes in that single instant between stimulus and response is the measure of our humanity—the measure of how far we’ve come in avoiding the forces of evolution. (We’ll discuss this later when we investigate vertical time.)
Between nature’s stimulus and our reasoned response in the sacred moment of now is our opportunity to be spiritual beings wholly beyond the forces of evolution. That’s what Eckhart Tolle discusses in The Power of Now. Between all that evolutionary, historical garbage pulling on us, pre-conditioning our instincts and trying to get us to attack the guy who cut us off in traffic, is a peaceful, spiritual orientation calling us towards our true, absolute nature—wholly calm, fully at peace, and beyond relativistic, violent causes and effects of any kind.
Our loving response in the moment of now provides proof to ourselves that we are far, far more than the spirits in tacky animal skins we are pretending to be.
Evolution is calling us to a predictable, violent movie. It is an invitation to participate as actor number 10,307,216,212 in a cheesy slasher flick where a bunch of stuff happens then everybody dies.
And just maybe from our deaths, the extremely slow, extremely incompetent screenwriter called evolution will make some humans suffer just slightly less 400,000 years from now, that is, if a whole new list of maladies doesn’t jump up to confront them.
Yeah, right.
The study of evolution is the study of longitudinally drawn-out incompetence. It is to ignore what is actually happening to humans right now, by scientifically glorifying the march to death with a ridiculous belief maybe things will be better at some point in the future.
Nature has caused humanity incessant suffering since the moment we hopped down from the trees with our sparkly new opposable thumbs. On what basis would we make the determination it will treat us to anything but suffering and death in the future?
Accountability is what separates a leader from an observer. We can observe slaughter all day long. But until we step in to stop it, we are not accountable, and we are not leaders.
Open your eyes, dear science
The master learns to see, with open, honest eyes, the truth of what is before him. Nature, perceived through the sensory perceptual filters it offers is a killing machine, plain and simple. A system of competition and death changing insignificantly over millions of years.
Forgive it. Bless it. And overcome your attachment to it, which includes endlessly studying its mechanism of suffering and death. Then you can allow God’s sacred love to come through it, like a backlight shining through the cracks in an aging movie screen. The slasher flick on the screen does not block the power of God’s love coming through nature. Not to the open-eyed sage who seeks the absolute, and only the absolute.
When we accept God’s call to move into our higher selves, we free nature from the deadly programming our own minds gave it under the power of our collective ego. It’s our story. Our horrible screenwriting. After the universe has been honestly accepted for what it is, then forgiven, it heals before our eyes in the sacred embrace of God’s saving grace.
But to lose ourselves in the study of evolution is like the man losing himself in the constructions of a nightmare; a meaningless illusion of suffering and death. A fantasy island floating like a mirage over the true ocean of love all before him. Let that love come through by truly seeing what’s before your eyes.
It’s time to take the red pill
Ignoring the higher context of healing and salvation, the study of evolution is a myopic appeasement to the killing machine that is spacetime; awe-inspired applause along its wholly predictable parade route to death.
“Ooh, look at how that yak’s coat is slightly thicker than yaks’ 100,000 years ago. How interesting! Bravo, nature! Bravo! Now be a good boy and trot on to your death, Mr. Yak.”
“Oooh, look at how that tree frog is a slightly darker shade of green than its predecessors. How amazing! Bravo, nature! Now, hop along on to your death, little tree frog.”
“Ooh, look how wonderfully balanced this parade is! Everybody’s dying in just the right amounts to keep it going!”
As Einstein said, the way out of this optical delusion of an individual existence of ours—our animal existence—is to expand our circle of compassion to include all of nature. Observation and compassion are two different things. Josef Mengele made all kinds of observations.
A movie critic watching that evolutionary parade would say, “This is the most predictable bunch of tripe I’ve ever seen. Costume changes don’t make a woefully predictable plot line more interesting.”
Evolution doesn’t prove God exists, nor disprove God exists.
It is a single shred of programming discovered inside a non-commutative matrix that kills everyone inside of it. Take the red pill, Nemo, and wake up.
There’s a lot to respond to here, so I’ll just mention a couple of things:
You’re right that evolution doesn’t prove anything about God. However, it does go some way toward making the God hypothesis unnecessary. Centuries ago, there was no natural explanation for what humans were doing on the planet except that some supernatural force had put them there, but now we really don’t need to assume the existence of any such force. “There’s no evidence God exists” is indeed a more appropriate claim than “God doesn’t exist”, for certain values of “God”, but without evidence, believing that God does exist seems futile and ill-advised.
The impression I get from reading this is that you accept that the evidence supports the theory of evolution, but just find the idea depressing. Your rather glib round-up of its achivements suggests that your understanding of what it means is rather flawed, but if God put us all here, then S.I.D.S. and the rest must be laid at his door. Nature isn’t malicious, or sadistic, or evil, it’s entirely amoral. It’s just a fact. But if peanut allergies and dying children and all this death and suffering are the best that God can do, that’s a worrying thought.
Cubiksrube-
Thanks for the comment and welcome to the discussion!
I would encourage you to read earlier posts to get the full gist of my arguments so far—most of your issues/points are addressed there. There’s a lot to wade through, but it’s worth it.
To address a couple of your thoughts:
According to the laws of science—one relative framework of understanding—the God Hyphothesis isn’t necessary. I agree, it’s not necessary according to that framework because it is an external-proof-based paradigm that doesn’t require any supernatural being in order to operate logically internal to itself, as you have pointed out.
The problem arises if that framework, and the physical world of nature it describes, (which causes tremendous suffering as I point out in this question) is illusory relative to a deeper reality, and we’re oblivious to that reality, hence the Matrix reference at the end of the post.
Certainly Einstein argued this point, calling our reality an “illusion, albeit a persistent one,” and pushing his entire life for a deeper reality from which absolute causality arose; even if it was to be found outside of space and time, according to biographer Walter Isaacson.
He wasnt’ talking about evolution, but something far more basic, primal and absolute, even beyond quantum mechanics, which describes matter right up to the edge of spacetime, and would certainly emcompass evolution.
In assigning evolution to God, you’re using the Reality Stapler (see backgrounder entry “The Crazy Step”); combining two levels of reality—the relatavistic universe in which evolution resides, and an absolute universe in which God resides.
The number one “value” ascribed to God is that He is love. What “evidence” is there that love exists? No external evidence is possible (see question #6). Carl Sagan pointed out in Contact that there is no evidence for love. Thus it is beyond the realm of science.
Is a belief in love futile and ill-advised? I hope not, since it is the one of the most important things to human beings. (10,000 people were asked the question, “What does a human being truly desire from life?” Love, joy, peace all made the top ten.)
I do support the scientific evidence that evolution exists, and have no intention of attacking the idea here from an existence standpoint relative to that observational framework.
As I said in an earlier post “to exist” or “to be real” according to a relative framework means “to obey the laws of.” I do believe evolution obeys the laws of science. Bringing God into that discussion mixes levels of realiy that cannot be mixed; hence the Reality Stapler idea.
I find arguments about God being a trickster, or tester God using evolution as a ruse to trick scientists into disbelieving the words of the Bible to be illogical and irrational. Why would God load the universe with fake evidence of evolution? That’s diabolical, given that the outcome, according to religion, would be eternal, unquenchable burning.
I agree with you, if God put us here only to die from peanut allergies, we’re all in trouble. But He, meaing the absolute Being, God, didn’t put us here; I answer that question on earlier posts as well.
Thanks again!
-Tom
You will know the god-creator you will want.
While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in the strict sense, after a thorough search you can, based on probability, assume something does not exist.
With evolution, it’s yet another unknown that has now a naturalistic explanation that marginalises God that bit further. The absence of evidence of God, given our extensive look at nature, is a good platform to rule out the existence of God. We would do this with any other claim, as Bertrand Russell pointed out with his Teapot argument.
viewfromreality-
Thanks for the response and welcome to the blog!
Sagan’s wisdom is absolute. Because we have no evidence for the existence of something absolutely, without exception, does not mean it does not exist. Science is a living history of this wisdom.
Recognizing absolutes and accepting them as true is part of science and the spiritual journey. Otherwise we create endless relativistic errors—like the Church saying “God is unconditionally loving (an absolute)…but he also burns people in hell.” The error occurs when we amend absolute wisdom according to our relativistic desires.
Regarding probability, if I had a collection of one billion marbles, and I did a thorough investigation of one marble, determining it to be germ-free, would it then be rational to assume there are no germs on the other 999,999,999 marbles?
Unwarranted extrapolation does not make for good science.
If God is formless love—as the mystics have said for millennia—doing a physical search (nature-based) that ignores love will never yield an accurate data set on which to construct a probability of existence. A man living on a fantasy island can thoroughly pull data from his environment as long as he wants and come up with exactly the probabilities he wishes in order to block out the deeper reality he is choosing to ignore.
Four boys who build a fort and post a “No girls allowed” sign can do surveys inside their fort from now until the day they die, and convince themselves that indeed, girls do not exist.
As Sam Harris points out, our body is one massive environmental filtration system. Physics talks about “bubbles of reality” screening and filtering our entire universe. Until science is willing to probe beyond the walls of their fort, their probabilities will always be based on a limited data set.
A spam filter set to the filtration criteria of science–physically measurable, quantifiable data—would block out love, peace, freedom, security and the other inner experiences humans desire most from life. Jesus said, “The kingdom is within you.” Science that is unwilling to probe that “inner kingdom” can build probability tables until the end of time and find only what it seeks to reinforce in its own mind.
tw