god vs universe II

listening to timo maas – maasterpieces (mixmag 03/05)

Doubtless this post is going to be influenced by my choice of musical muse, so if apologies are needed you can take that for what it’s worth.

Alright. Let me see if I have this straight.

On one side of the room, we’ll call it the right side, we have the religious faithful. On the left side we’ll put the skeptics. Or, to call them what they are, those that follow the scientific faith.

I should announce right off the bat that I’m tackling Creationism vs Evolution for the first part of this ramble, and choosing as my benchmark a perhaps polarized attitude for each. There are Creationists that now allow some room for a certain amount of evolution just as there are Evolutionists who will admit that they don’t know How It All Started. But I’m not here to play nicey nice so we’re going to leave those people to mingle in the middle of the room and enjoy their cocktails.

Rather than start at The Beginning I’ll start right here in my lifetime and then fling us all backward. Fun.

Here we go then.

A popular argument right now, today, for the existence of a Supreme Omniscient Power (SOP) is that the whole universe seems to fit quite nicely together and how could something like that happen without a Grand Design. I see this argument a lot. It’s all over the Web and I’d imagine a pretty popular theme in churches and Sunday Tea. It’s as convincing an argument today as it was 12000 years ago when somebody first brained somebody else for disagreeing with it.

Obviously the other side of the argument, the left side, is Evolution. For those that hate a glib answer I’ll break it down with an illustration:

Let’s say, for the sake of this conversation, that the overwhelming evidence is true and the universe really has been around for billions of years. I’ll get back to the tenuousness of this point later for the sake of the Creationists.

Alright, billions of years we have to work with. That’s a lot of freakin’ time. Simplify. We’ll take a species already partway along the path. He’s small and he’s got four legs and fur and he eats plants. He also keeps getting eaten by a bigger furry four-legged creature. This goes on for thousands of years, millions, and nobody questions it. Still, it sucks. You just set up a kid’s college fund and he goes and gets himself eaten coming home from some party. Stoopid kids. Then one night a kid makes it home and tells his dad he ran as fast as he could and managed to escape. Well. This is very interesting. Not that it matters, because two weeks later he found out the hard way he wasn’t fast enough to do it again.

Over the next few thousand years you’d hear stories about somebody managing to outrun the big furry predators. Very rare but it happens.

Then there was that local hero who did it twice. Of course you know how that ended. He married a babe who had also outrun the beasts. They had kids, but the kids all got eaten.

Thousands more years pass. Along comes another zippy hero who marries a zippy hero and they have kids and one of those kids lives long enough to not only outrun the predators but have kids too!

But they all die.

Thousands more years pass.

Eventually, though. Eventually a handful from each generation are outrunning the predator and surviving long enough to breed, and the fastest of those offspring survive to pass it on.

Most of them get eaten. For millions of years.

That is evolution. Way more than 99% failure. Virtually 100%. But an infinitesimal portion of the species survives to pass on the key trait that enables them to live in their environment and they win their slot in the system while dozens of other species die out completely or move on.

And by the time we come along to observe them they seem perfectly, mystically, magically adapted to their environment as though placed there by the SOP. Bunny wabbits.

The response from Creationists is almost instantaneous and in fact they’ve been chomping at the bit almost since I opened my mouth at the podium. “But dude, the system is so blindingly complex that only [SOP] could have created it. You’re describing something that sounds an awful lot like chaos. Nothing could survive 100% failure.”

Life has failed lots of times though. It took a billion years just to win the merrit badge for “Bona Fide Lifeform”. We kept getting nuked by stray lightning bolts and lava flows. And even when we finally managed to grab life and keep it it still took another billion years to get out of the pool. Usually we just got thrown up by the waves and toasted by the sun. It took a while to fluke our way to skins thick enough to withstand gravity and rocks and weather. Never mind figuring out how to travel far enough to find a mate.

Take the argument a little further and you end up having to accept evolution because the system is so complex. It’s the only way life can adjust to an infinitely changing environment.

So maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe you declare, with holy scripture held high, that Creation didn’t happen twenty billion years ago. It happened, say, six thousand years ago. And all the fossil evidence and geologic evidence and astronomical evidence has all been planted there to give us a sense of history. Making us comfy and giving us something to talk about.

Told you I’d come back to it. Now we’re getting into the meat of it.

If the SOP Created all this just a week ago last Wednesday and dusted it up a bit to look old, you invite the argument that he sought to conceal his Creation and give it an air of legitimacy. You’re implying that he tried to hide his touch. Why bother otherwise? Why make it look old if it isn’t? Why make it look natural? Why not stick a sign in the ground saying, “I made this.” Why go to all the trouble of hiding his efforts? Is he just baiting us? Testing our faith? Taunting us with alternate prologues? Why go to the trouble of making something a billion lightyears away look like it’s ten billion years old? Why perpetrate this charade in such detail?

It’s not just illogical. It’s dangerous.

I’m not questioning the SOP or even his existence. I’m questioning the interpretation. The fundamental fallibility of mortalkind. We say all of Creation is only a few thousand years old, but evidence says otherwise. We say SOP planted the evidence there, but that only makes sense if he’s trying to conceal his touch. And why do that at all?

Why not Create it all just exactly when it looks like it was Created? Why not Create Life and let it Evolve according to The Plan?

Here it comes.

If we admit that maybe that is indeed the case and we might be interpreting our own holy scriptures incorrectly then we open the floodgates for All Kinds Of Doubt. If we’re reading the Book wrong, or at best mistaking a metaphor for fact, what else might we be screwing up?

I’m done with you Creationists and Evolutionists now. You can go back to your bevvies. On with making my actual point:

We rely on these holy scriptures to be our primary reference, our ultimate refuge. This is the Word of God, either directly or as close to as we can get away with. We appoint or are handed our figures of religious authority whom we entrust to interpret and communicate to us the Will of SOP. What sort of bedlam are we inviting if we accept that the words of the holy scriptures are at best parables and law-as-religion written by people who were themselves appointed in the days when sandals were pretty civilized footwear?

Maybe we’re wrong and we should look at all this with fresh eyes.

I’m asking the impossible, of course. Big Religion depends on history for its authority and is therefore necessarily tied to the tragically outmoded morality that comes with it. Expecting any faith to admit that their interpretation may be desperately in need of an update is completely unrealistic.

For the genuinely faithful it’s too close to asking SOP to change his mind, and for the theopoliticians it’s too close to asking them to admit their inherited morality is wrong.

I drew a line there. Did you see that? There are two kinds of people in religion- those that have faith and those that use it as a bludgeon to spread their own dogmatic morality.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea of making anyone question their faith. And I’m a little sad that I’m uncomfortable with it. What’s wrong with finding your own way through life? Even if it leads you straight back to SOP’s table.

But for the theopoliticians… I would like to do a little bludgeoning myself. I don’t think it’s right for anyone to oppress in the name of faith, especially when it’s justified with one of those holy scriptures. Here are faiths whose prime tenet is love thy neighbour even if he doesn’t agree with everything you say, and people claiming to be True Christians and Muslims and Jews are running around killing people like they can win prizes. Killing and torturing and mutilating and raping and beating and hating.

Hel-LO! Did you READ your Book?

My problem isn’t with the SOP. It’s with his followers. I know, funny bumper sticker. But when millions of people all over the planet are using a Book to justify their actions the problem isn’t the Word. It’s the willing abandonment of common sense when interpreting the Word.

There is no common sense in killing.
There is no common sense in punishing someone who doesn’t share your faith.
There is no common sense in expecting someone of another faith to convert when even your fellow worshippers can’t agree on everything.
There is no common sense in believing that you of all people Have It Right.
There is no common sense in denying half your population the rights enjoyed by the rest
There is no common sense in denying anyone their basic human rights.
There is no common sense in neglecting your duty to your neighbours to crusade elsewhere.
There is no common sense in rewarding five at the expense of five million.

There is a lot of common sense couched in religious texts. Some of it is dated but at the time it was the best way to communicate an important message like, “don’t eat pigs because they carry all sorts of diseases.”

Unfortunately some people tend to focus on the “smite thine enemy for eternal reward” bits, and never mind that it contradicts the rest of the Book. Never mind how much contradiction there is in the Book. Never mind The Message that is the Golden Rule.

Never mind that the guy waving the Book over his head and screaming for war and liberty might just be a crazyman.