Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has some interesting things to say on the importance of details in establishing credibility of any knowledge system. In his Reply to a Christian he points out how central it is to religious beliefs that one avoids any kinds of details that might lead to refutation, something that I have also been writing about for some time. His essay is worth quoting at length.
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Sometimes great writers reveal truths that are hidden. At other times they reveal truths that are squarely in front of our eyes but which we do not see because we have not asked the right question. Mark Twain’s story The War Prayer fits into the latter category.
The idea of the intercessory prayer, where one asks for a favor or blessing for oneself or for a designated group of people, is such a familiar staple of religious life that its basis is unquestioned. But Twain points out what should have been obvious if we had only thought it through. The key section about the nature of such prayers is revealed when he writes:
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In one of the classic Peanuts cartoons, Linus says that when he grows up he wants to become a great doctor and rid the world of illness. His sister Lucy tells him he can’t because he doesn’t care enough about humanity. An indignant Linus responds, “I love humanity! It’s people I can’t stand!”
I remembered that cartoon as I was writing the recent series of posts about the difficulties with believing that the mind/soul is a non-material entity that can exist independently of the material body and brain. I wrote about how Descartes struggled with how to understand the actual working of the model.
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Belief in a god rests on a foundation that requires one to postulate the existence of a mind/soul that can exist independently of the body (after all, the soul is assumed to live on after the physical death of the body) and freely make decisions. The idea that the brain is all there is, that is creates our consciousness and that the mind/soul are auxiliary products of that overall consciousness, strikes at the very root of belief in god.
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An article titled Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) examined what neuroscientists are discovering about religion and the brain. It is a curious article. The author (Richard Monastersky) seems to be trying very hard to find evidence in support of the idea that brain research is pointing to the independent existence of a soul/mind, but it is clear on reading it that he comes up short and that there is no such evidence, only the hopes of a very small minority of scientists.
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In the previous posting, I discussed two competing models of the mind/brain relationship.
It seems to me that the first model, where the physical brain is all there is and the mind is simply the creation of the brain, is the most persuasive one since it is the simplest and accepting it involves no further complications. In this model, our bodies are purely material things, with the brain’s workings enabling us to think, speak, reason, act, and so forth. The idea of ‘free will’ is an illusion due to the brain being an enormously complicated system whose processes and end results cannot be predicted. (A good analogy would be classically chaotic systems like the weather. Because of the specific non-linearity of the equations governing weather, we cannot predict long-term weather even though the system is a deterministic and materialistic.)
The second model, that of an independently existing non-material mind/soul, separate from the brain and directing the brain, immediately raises all kinds of problems, which have long been recognized. The scientist-philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) of “I think, therefore I am” fame was perhaps the first person to formulate this mind-body dualism (or at least he is the person most closely associated with the idea) and it is clear that he felt that it was necessary to adopt this second model if one was to retain a belief in god.
But he realized immediately that it raises the problem of how the non-material mind/soul can interact with the material brain/body to get it to do things. Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom Descartes had an extended correspondence, was unable to understand Descartes’ explanation of this interaction and kept prodding him on this very question. Descartes had no adequate answer for her, even though both clearly wanted to believe in the existence of god and the soul. In the introduction to his translation of Descartes’ Meditations and other Metaphysical Writings (which contains extended segments of the Elizabeth-Descartes correspondence), Desmond Clarke writes:
After repeated attempts to answer the question, how is it possible for something which is not physical to interact with something else which, by definition is not physical?, Descartes concedes that he cannot explain how it is possible.
But he tried, using the best scientific knowledge available to him at that time. He argued that the location of the soul’s interaction with the body occurred in the pineal gland.
As is well known, Descartes chose the pineal gland because it appeared to him to be the only organ in the brain that was not bilaterally duplicated and because he believed, erroneously, that it was uniquely human. . . By localizing the soul’s contact with body in the pineal gland, Descartes had raised the question of the relationship of mind to the brain and nervous system. Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes, in search of certitude, had paradoxically created intellectual chaos.
Although Descartes failed in his efforts to convincingly demonstrate the independent existence of the soul, research into the relationship of religious beliefs to the central nervous system of the brain has continued.
Descartes is an interesting character. Much of his scientific work, and even his temperament, seem to indicate a materialistic outlook. But at the same time, he took great pains to try and find proofs of god’s existence. One gets the sense that he was a person trying to convince himself of something he did not quite believe in, and had he lived in a different time might have rejected god with some relief. The article on Descartes in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 13 June 2006 says:
Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
The article points to reasons for the ambiguousness of his views, which could be due to the fact that there was, at that time, considerable fear of the power of the Catholic Church and this may have guided the way he presented his work.
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes definitely comes across as somewhat less than pious, and non-traditional in his religious beliefs.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of – though he tried to conceal – the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.
Clearly he was not orthodox in his thinking. Although he tried to believe in god, it was his emphasis on applying the materialistic principles that he used in his scientific work to try and identify the mechanism by which the mind interacts with the brain that has the potential to create the big problem for religion.
To sum up Descartes’ argument, following sound scientific (methodological naturalistic) principles, he felt that if the mind interacted with the brain, then there had to be (1) some mechanism by which the non-material mind could influence the material brain, and (2) some place where this interaction took place. Although he could not satisfactorily answer the first question, he at least postulated a location for the interaction, the pineal gland. We know now that that is wrong, but the questions he raised are still valid and interesting ones that go to the heart of religion.
Next: What current researchers are finding about the brain and religion.
POST SCRIPT: Documentary on Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama
I have written before about the murder of my friend Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama, who had been an active and outspoken campaigner for human rights in Sri Lanka. I have learned that a documentary about her life called No More Tears Sister is the opening program in the 2006 PBS series P.O.V.
In the Cleveland area, the program is being shown on Friday, June 30, 2006 at 10:00pm on WVIZ 25. Airing dates vary by location, with some PBS stations showing it as early as June 27. The link above gives program listings for other cities. The synopsis on the website says:
If love is the first inspiration of a social revolutionary, as has sometimes been said, no one better exemplified that idea than Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. Love for her people and her newly independent nation, and empathy for the oppressed of Sri Lanka – including women and the poor – led her to risk her middle-class life to join the struggle for equality and justice for all. Love led her to marry across ethnic and class lines. In the face of a brutal government crackdown on her Tamil people, love led her to help the guerrilla Tamil Tigers, the only force seemingly able to defend the people. When she realized the Tigers were more a murderous gang than a revolutionary force, love led her to break with them, publicly and dangerously. Love then led her from a fulfilling professional life in exile back to her hometown of Jaffna and to civil war, during which her human-rights advocacy made her a target for everyone with a gun. She was killed on September 21, 1989 at the age of 35.
As beautifully portrayed in Canadian filmmaker Helene Klodawsky’s “No More Tears Sister,” kicking off the 19th season of public television’s P.O.V. series, Rajani Thiranagama’s life is emblematic of generations of postcolonial leftist revolutionaries whose hopes for a future that combined national sovereignty with progressive ideas of equality and justice have been dashed by civil war – often between religious and ethnic groups, and often between repressive governments and criminal rebel gangs. Speaking out for the first time in the 15 years since Rajani Thiranagama’s assassination, those who knew her best talk about the person she was and the sequence of events that led to her murder. Especially moving are the memories of Rajani’s older sister, Nirmala Rajasingam, with whom she shared a happy childhood, a political awakening and a lifelong dedication to fighting injustice; and her husband, Dayapala Thiranagama, who was everything a middle-class Tamil family might reject – a Sinhalese radical student from an impoverished rural background. Also included are the recollections of Rajani’s younger sisters, Vasuki and Sumathy; her parents; her daughters, Narmada and Sharika; and fellow human-rights activists who came out of hiding to tell her story. The film rounds out its portrayal with rare archival footage, personal photographs and re-enactments in which Rajani is portrayed by daughter Sharika Thiranagama. The film is narrated by Michael Ondaatje, esteemed author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost.
I knew Rajini well. We were active members of the Student Christian Movement in Sri Lanka when we were both undergraduates at the University of Colombo. It does not surprise me in the least that she threw herself with passion into the struggle for justice. She was brave and spoke the truth, even when it was unpalatable to those in power and with guns, and backed up her words with actions, thus putting her life on the line for her beliefs. Such people are rare. I am proud to have known her.
In the previous post we saw how human beings are believed to not be natural critical thinkers, preferring instead to believe in the first plausible explanation for anything that comes along, not seeing these initial explanations as merely hypotheses to be evaluated against competing hypotheses.
But one might think that when we are exposed to alternative hypotheses, we might then shift gears into a critical mode. But Tim van Gelder, writing in the article Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science (College Teaching, Winter 2005, vol. 53, No. 1, p. 41-46) argues that what foils this is the human desire for belief preservation.
He quotes seventeenth century philosopher Francis Bacon who said:
The mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.
In other words, van Gelder says, “the mind has intrinsic tendencies toward illusion, distortion, and error.” These arise from a combination of being hard-wired in our brains (because of evolution), natural growth of our brains as we grow up in the Earth’s environment, and the influence of our societies and cultures. “Yet, whatever their origin, they are universal and ineradicable features of our cognitive machinery, usually operating quite invisibly to corrupt our thinking and contaminate our beliefs.”
All these things lead us to have cognitive biases and blind spots that prevent us from seeing things more clearly, and one of the major blind spots is that of belief preservation. van Gelder says that “At root, belief preservation is the tendency to make evidence subservient to belief, rather than the other way around. Put another way, it is the tendency to use evidence to preserve our opinions rather than guide them.”
van Gelder says that when we strongly believe some thing or desire it to be true, we tend to do three things: “1. We seek evidence that supports what we believe and do not seek and avoid or ignore evidence that goes against it. . . 2. We rate evidence as good or bad depending on whether it supports or conflicts with our belief. That is, the belief dictates our evaluation of the evidence, rather than our evaluation of the evidence determining what we should believe. . . 3. We stick with our beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence as long as we can find at least some support, no matter how slender.”
This would explain why (as vividly demonstrated in the popular video A Private Universe) people hold on to their erroneous explanations about the phases of the moon even after they have been formally instructed in school about the correct explanation.
This would also explain the question that started these musings: Why for so long had I not applied the same kinds of questioning to my religious beliefs concerning god, heaven, etc. that I routinely applied to other areas of my life? The answer is that since I grew up in a religious environment and accepted the existence of god as plausible, I did not seek other explanations. Any evidence in favor of belief (the sense of emotional upliftment that sometimes occurs during religious services or private prayer, or some event that could be interpreted to indicate god’s action in my life or in the world, or scientific evidence that supported a statement in the Bible) was seized on, while counter evidence (such a massive death and destruction caused by human or natural events, personal misfortunes or tragedies, or scientific discoveries that contradicted Biblical texts) was either ignored or explained away. It was only after I had abandoned my belief in god’s existence that I was able to ask the kinds of questions that I had hitherto avoided.
Did I give up my belief because I could not satisfactorily answer the difficult questions concerning god? Or did I start asking those questions only after I had given up belief in god? In some sense this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Looking back, it is hard to say. Probably it was a little of both. Once I started taking some doubts seriously and started questioning, this probably led to more doubts, more questions, until finally the religious edifice that I had hitherto believed in just collapsed.
In the series of posts dealing with the burden of proof concerning the existence of god, I suggested that if we use the common yardsticks of law or science, then that would require that the burden of proof lies with the person postulating the existence of any entity (whether it be god or a neutrino or whatever), and that in the absence of positive evidence in favor of existence, the default assumption is to assume the non-existence of the entity.
In a comment to one of those postings, Paul Jarc suggested that the burden of proof actually lay with the person trying to convince the other person to change his views. It may be that we are both right. What I was describing was the way that I thought things should be, while Paul was describing the way things are in actual life, due to the tendency of human beings to believe the first thing that sounds right and makes intuitive sense, coupled with the desire to preserve strong beliefs once formed.
van Gelder ends up his article with some good advice:
Belief preservation strikes right at the heart of our general processes of rational deliberation. The ideal critical thinker is aware of the phenomenon, actively monitors her thinking to detect its pernicious influence, and deploys compensatory strategies.
Thus, the ideal critical thinker
• puts extra effort into searching for and attending to evidence that contradicts what she currently believes;
• when “weighing up” the arguments for and against, gives some “extra credit” for those arguments that go against her position; and
• cultivates a willingness to change her mind when the evidence starts mounting against her.Activities like these do not come easily. Indeed, following these strategies often feels quite perverse. However, they are there for self-protection; they can help you protect your own beliefs against your tendency to self-deception, a bias that is your automatic inheritance as a human being. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
The practice of science requires us to routinely think this way. But it is not easy to do and even scientists find it hard to give up their cherished theories in the face of contrary evidence. But because scientific practice requires this kind of thinking, this may also be why science is perceived as ‘hard’ by the general public. Not because of its technical difficulties, but because you are constantly being asked to give up beliefs that seem so naturally true and intuitively obvious.
POST SCRIPT: The people who pay the cost of war
I have nothing to add to this powerful short video, set to the tune of Johnny Cash singing Hurt. Just watch. (Thanks to Jesus’ General.)
When people are asked to explain the phases of the moon, the response given most frequently is that they are caused by the shadow of the Earth falling on the moon. They are not aware that this explanation holds true only for rare cases of eclipses, and not for the everyday phases.
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During the time I was a Christian, I took it for granted that immortality was not only a Good Thing, it was the thing that mattered most. The idea that if one believes in Jesus (or in some other way meets the needs of Christian doctrine), one is saved and has eternal life is a central tenet of Christianity. The formulation “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” is something that any Christian can recite. It makes up the famous verse John 3:16 which you will often see written on a bed sheet and draped over railings at big sporting events. (This passage is so familiar to Christians that I was able to type it out accurately after all these years without even looking it up.)
What is surprising is that despite all the emphasis on going to heaven as the main point of living, the Bible contains very few actual descriptions of the place and what people there actually do. Even the good folks at Rapture Ready, who are counting the minutes until the world ends and they get taken up, admit that they don’t have much data on this key question. Their page What Heaven Will Be Like is very brief. (Disturbingly, for me personally at least, it says that in heaven the laws of physics do not apply. Why is this information not given to students when they are deciding what to major in? In the unlikely event that I am raptured, all my years of study and work will have been wasted and in heaven I will have to learn a new trade.)
The one really concrete description comes from (where else?) the Book of Revelations and it says that everyone in heaven will live in a place called New Jerusalem, which consists of a cube of side 1,500 miles. Although large (roughly the size of the moon), it should be easy to visit friends since the Rapture Ready website says that people in heaven will be able to travel instantaneously, presumably because of their ability to circumvent the laws of physics that are such restrictive nuisances for us on Earth.
Islam is more detailed than Christianity in its descriptions of heaven. Ibn Warraq writes in Virgins? What virgins? that the Koran gives the following description:
What of the rewards in paradise? The Islamic paradise is described in great sensual detail in the Koran and the Traditions; for instance, Koran sura 56 verses 12-40 ; sura 55 verses 54-56 ; sura 76 verses 12-22. I shall quote the celebrated Penguin translation by NJ Dawood of sura 56 verses 12-39: “They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds… We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand. . .”
So basically heaven for Muslims consists of your choice of food and drink and sex, with no negative after effects. Ibn Warraq’s article describes Muslim commentators who go into even more great detail about the sexual pleasures of heaven, seemingly written exclusively from the male perspective.
I wrote previously that asking questions like where heaven is located and how it is related to life on Earth can make belief complicated because of the scientific problems it creates. First off, how come we cannot detect heaven’s existence although we are now able to probe the far reaches of the universe? Is heaven in some parallel universe, with impenetrable barriers? But they cannot be totally impenetrable since people can get there from here. Since most people believe that people in heaven can see and hear us as we go about on Earth, that means that light and sound waves can travel from Earth to heaven, crossing the barrier. So must it be a one-way barrier? How would such a barrier work to prevent two-way transmission? (This is again the kind of question a physicist would ask, because I have trouble accepting that the laws of physics don’t apply in heaven.)
But another problem is: what is it about heaven that is supposed to make it so attractive? Most people, even if they have no explicit model to work from, envisage eternal life in heaven as where everything is very pleasant and discouraging words are never heard. But surely if everything is perfect, and people in heaven live forever experiencing neither pain nor sorrow, it also has to be dull?
And that is the key problem. I cannot conceive of any way of conceptualizing heaven that is not also mind-numbingly boring. The only way to overcome that is to think that our personalities in heaven also change so that we never get tired of unchanging perfection. (“Wow, this grape is delicious! Wow, so is the next one! And the next one!…”) But then people become boring.
For example, suppose you are an avid golfer and your vision of heaven is where you can play everyday in perfect weather. Does being in heaven mean that you hit perfect shots each time? But if you do and your opponent does too, wouldn’t that take the fun out of the game? Golf is trivial, but I cannot think of anything at all that would not get tedious very quickly if one was assured of constant success. Pleasure in life goes along with failure. Take away failure and pain and loss and I am not sure what pleasure means.
The only thing that I personally can see that is good about immortality is that I may learn the answers to some difficult and unanswered questions that may elude me in my lifetime: Is quantum mechanics the ultimate theory or is there a deeper underlying theory? What exactly happens when the quantum wave function collapses in its interaction with the observer? How can one unambiguously draw the quantum/classical system boundary? How does the brain produce consciousness and the appearance of free will? Why do so many people find Julia Roberts attractive?
So basically, my own idea of heaven is to have the equivalent of unlimited high-speed internet access and subscriptions to science journals. But even that would be boring if I had to wait around a long time for Earth-bound scientists to find (if they ever do) the answers to those questions. On the other hand, if people in heaven already know the answers to these questions and told me as soon as I got there (not that there’s much chance of that), then there would be nothing to look forward to.
I can think of many, many things that would be wonderful to experience for a very short time but all of them would bore me totally if they went on indefinitely. It reminds me of the time, soon after high school in Sri Lanka, when I had a temporary job working in a chocolate factory. I was told that we could eat all the chocolates we wanted and since I loved chocolate, this sounded like heaven, and everyone envied me. But after a week of eating chocolate, I was sick of it.
I am becoming convinced that we have pleasure on Earth precisely because it is unpredictable and transient, it is mixed with pain and failure, and we know that everything, including our lives, will eventually come to an end. We experience happiness and pleasure at moments in time, but for those moments to occur they must be preceded by periods of anticipation, disappointment, and failures. Take those things away and there is no pleasure either
It amazes me that I never asked any of these questions or thought of any of these things until now. Even during the many years I was religious, I never questioned then what form eternal life would take and whether it is such an unequivocal Good Thing after all. This is surprising because I was always curious about other things and trying to make connections.
Is there something in the way we are taught our religious beliefs that gently steers us away from these questions because they are so problematic? Why had I never probed deeply into what heaven might be like?
In the next posting, I will look at what research in cognitive science says about why we don’t ask questions or look for answers to certain questions, even when it might seem obvious that we should do so.
POST SCRIPT: Our tax dollars at work in the DHS
Ray LeMoine writes about his weird experience at the hands of Department of Homeland Security officials on his return to the US after traveling in the Islamic world.
The series of postings on the burden of proof in relation to the existence of god (see part 1, part 2, and part 3) produced some very thoughtful comments by readers that explore many facets of the issue, and I would urge those interested to read those comments.
What initiated that series of posts was Laplace’s comment that he had no need to hypothesize the existence of god to understand the workings of the universe. I agree with that point, that whether or not one believes in god is a matter of choice and that there is no evidence for the existence of god that is compelling in the way that science requires in support of its hypotheses. In the absence of such compelling positive evidence, I simply proceed on the assumption of non-existence of god.
But the issue of choice is not just between the existence and non-existence of god. Religious people who personally feel that there exists evidence for the existence of god also have to make a choice, except that in their case they have to choose what kind of god to believe in. Believing in a Christian god means rejecting a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or other vision of god.
But the need for making choices does not end there. Even if one has chosen to believe in a Christian god, one has to make further choices. The fact is that there are many different kinds of god portrayed in the Bible – vengeful, loving, murderous, merciful, just, capricious, cruel, generous, and so on. A god who can order every living thing in the world to be drowned except for one family and two representatives of each species (in Noah’s flood) is revealing quite a different attitude to life and death from a god who tells Abraham (Genesis 18:16-33) that he cannot bring himself to destroy the wicked town of Sodom because of the possibility that it might contain even as few as ten righteous persons who did not deserve to die. It is impossible to make the case that there is a single vision of god in the Bible, unless one also asserts that human comprehension is too weak to understand and resolve the different portrayals into one non-contradictory whole.
It is clear that what most religious believers have done is chosen what type of god they wish to believe in and what type to reject. In the contemporary political context, some Christians have chosen the gay-lifestyle hating god, while others have chosen a gay-lifestyle accepting god, and so on. Depending on what choice was made results in each person having to explain away those features that seem to contradict the view of god they have chosen. This partly explains why churches tend to splinter into so many different denominations and why there are so many disagreements about what god expects from people and how god expects people to behave.
If you want to believe in a kind and loving god, you have some stiff challenges to overcome, not limited to the appalling massacre of people in the great flood. For example, take the story of Abraham and Isaac. For those not familiar with this story (Genesis chapters 21 and 22), Abraham and Sarah did not have children for a long time and finally (when Abraham was 100 years old) she gave birth to Isaac. But then god decides to ‘test’ Abraham and asks him to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham obeys, making all the preparations for this horrendous sacrifice until at the very last moment, just as he is about to kill the boy, god stops him. God is impressed by Abraham’s unquestioning obedience and rewards him.
This story is disturbing on a whole host of levels. What kind of god would ask a parent to kill his child as a test of faith? And what kind of person would be willing to kill his own child to prove his faith? If we knew of anyone today who was planning to sacrifice his child to prove his worthiness to god, would we not feel justified in labeling that person as dangerously hallucinating and do everything we could to stop him, including forcible restraint and even incarceration? So why is Abraham’s behavior seen as somehow noble? And why is god given a pass for asking someone to commit murder? Even if one were to assume that god and Abraham were engaged in some monstrous game of chicken, not believing that the sacrifice will be actually carried out but simply playing mind games, waiting for the other to relent first so that the murder is avoided, this episode still does not reflect well on either party.
Or take the tsunami which killed hundreds of thousands of people in South East Asia in December 2004. I moderated a discussion of faculty members from the major religions to discuss the question of theodicy (theories to justify the ways of God to people, or understanding why bad things happen to good people). But the very topic of theodicy assumes that what we think of as bad (such as the deaths of children) are in fact not deliberate acts of god. Why should we think that? How do we know that god did not deliberately kill all these people out of a sense of whimsy or out of callousness or because he was bored or because he likes seeing people suffer?
The answer is that we don’t really know the answers to these questions or to the ones raised about Abraham and Isaac because we have no way of knowing the true nature of god even if we believed in god’s existence. What most people have done is choose to believe in a god who would not casually murder people. They are not compelled to make such a choice by anything in the Bible.
This illustrates a paradox. Believers in a god will often explain away disturbing facts by arguing that we mere mortals cannot really understand god’s ineffable plan, but at the same time argue that they know god’s nature. The reality is that people are choosing a god that is congenial to their world-view.
Choice is always involved whether one is a believer or not. While believers choose one vision of god and reject all others, atheists go just one step further and reject all visions of god. It is not such a big step.
POST SCRIPT: Update on net neutrality
As I wrote earlier, the net neutrality amendment was defeated in the House of Representatives. The issue now goes to the Senate, which is where there is the best chance of writing it into law. The excellent website Talking Points Memo is maintaining a list of which way each senator is leaning on this issue for those of you who want to try and exert pressure on your own senator.
For more information on this issue, updates, and contact information to take action, see SaveTheInternet.com.