God and insanity

In a recent study, researchers have found that belief in an "angry god" correlates strongly with mental illness.  Of various types of gods that were studied, "[b]elief in a punitive God was positively associated with four psychiatric symptoms."  Indeed, belief in a benevolent god was negatively associated with those four symptoms.

This just reinforces my notion that it's not a question of theist versus atheist, but of nutjob versus rational person.  And that tells me that humanists need to work more with the so-called moderates. It's the nutjobs that are really causing all the trouble - theist and atheist alike.  It's up to us rational types to sort this out - clearly they cannot and likely would not.

Rational argumentation and civilized discussion will never work with the nutjobs, by definition.  We need to convince the moderates that the world will be a better place for everyone if we can properly marginalize - and hopefully institutionalize - the nutjobs.

Why Murder is "Bad"

I'm going to propose a rationale for why we believe murder is bad.  I am convinced that one can define the "badness" of murder by appealing only to what we know about how humans evolved and how humans interact.  I don't think anyone has demonstrated this claim scientifically yet, and I am not the one qualified to conduct those studies.  I know there's a body of work on evolutionary theories of morality, but I've had little chance to read much of it.  Still, the hypothesis is, I think, reasonable, and until it is falsified seems quite sufficient (to me, at least) to form an ethical foundation.  The underlying goal here is to suggest that all morality is really driven by socialized, evolved instinct.  I'm starting here with a fairly plain example just to try to keep things simple.

Let's define murder, for the sake of this discussion, as the intentional killing of a human being.  One may quibble about some of the boundary conditions - such as what exactly is a human being, or what constitutes intent - but these will not affect the core definition.

In a population where murder is common, individuals will feel highly stressed.  This stress lowers the overall energy an individual can devote to reproduction.  Entities that do not fear the risks associated with common and deadly circumstances will not avoid such circumstances, and will fall prey to them more often than those who avoid them.  Over time, those individuals whose genes confer on them a fear of deadly circumstances will overwhelm those whose genes do not confer such fear.  There's nothing magical here; it's just evolution.

Organisms also evolved to be empathic - that is, to feel for other organisms as if the experiences of others were their own.  It is often most vividly experienced between parents and off-spring, but also exists to lesser degrees in humans towards virtually any other life-form that exhibits anything remotely likely "human" behaviour.  Empathy again can be viewed as providing evolutionary advantage, especially in herd/social animals like humans, in two ways.  First, empathy drives us to care for the social group, which increases the odds of survival and reproduction of all members.  Second, the safety of the group helps lower the stress of the individual.  By lowering stress, all the group members increase the odds of survival and reproduction.

These stresses are innate and deeply visceral, extending back probably hundreds of millions of years; there's precious little an individual can do against them.  But one can act to remove the triggers that cause those stresses - like working towards situations where murder is not common.

So organisms started to act so as to lower those stresses.  Over the aeons, various actions that lowered the causes of those stressors gave subtle advantages to those organisms that took those actions and let them slowly overwhelm other organisms.  These actions started to form sets of behaviours that distinguished one group from another.

Of course, there's substantial variability in those norms among individuals in a group.  There will always be variability.  With respect to the example of murder, different people will have slightly different norms about how "bad" it is.  What effects that variability has on matters is something best left to future posts.

Humans, and a few other species, also learned to reason - that is, there evolved in them abilities to think temporally and abstractly, to plan, to induct and deduct consequences of actions without necessarily actually executing them, and to generalize from specific cases.  Most importantly, they evolved the ability to reflect - to think about those mental models that include their selves.  Humans seem particularly good at reasoning compared to most other species.  This ability to reason led to the development of abstract concepts, like "murder," "good," and "evil," and so on, which then opened the possibility of developing principles of behaviour that encapsulated all the unconscious, instinctive, and evolved abilities that came from our more primitive predecessors.  Different belief systems of these abstract concepts will introduce further variability in the behavioural norms, but it seems to always be variation on a theme.

Here enters "socialization."  As norms within a social group are developed, new generations of individuals are indoctrinated into those norms.  They spend their formative years surrounded by them, informed by them, rewarded and punished in accordance with them.  As they mature, those norms become internalized, and provide a context for assessing what is "good" and "bad."  By adopting and internalizing the norms of one's social group, one helps ensure one's "security," which lowers one's stress, which forms a positive feedback loop with the underlying evolved instincts at work.  These norms reinforce and often tweak the innate and evolved instincts that we all have.  Nowhere is the impact of socialization more obvious than in the clashes that occur between different cultures (where a "culture" could well be defined as a group with a uniform set of social norms.)  Socialization will add yet more variability to the behavioural norms.

Still, some norms are so basic, so rooted in our evolved instincts, that they are universally adopted.

Thus, "murder is bad" remains a justified and reasonable generalization that accounts for most cases of "murder," in most cultures.  If there are exceptions (I don't know of any), then they must be explained for this theory of mine to make sense.  But that too goes beyond the draft I want to present here.

This view also impacts on the notion of "moral absolutism."  The absolutist position is that some actions are always right or wrong, regardless of circumstance.  The question that arises, though, is what exactly is meant by absolutism.  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the view that I describe above is correct.  In that case, one might limit "absolutism" to the extent that it's domain is bounded by the limits of our evolution and socialization.  So insofar as we all share a common evolution, we can safely say that, at least as far as "life on earth" is concerned, there is such a thing as moral absolutism, and that it is grounded in the mechanisms of evolution and the specific instincts that we have.

But that's not really absolutism, is it?

Indeed, I think there's no such thing as true absolutism.  I cannot think of a single thing, phenomenon, or entity in the known universe that, on sufficiently close study, is absolute.  One might suggest concepts like absolute zero, but even that is bounded by the nature of our universe.  And as it's not clear that our universe is the only one there is, then we cannot really say (yet) whether absolute zero is anything more than a measure of a characteristic relative to our universe.

Whether absolutism, in morality or anything else, really exists, however, is rather beside the point here.  More important is why we bother with morality to begin with.  Why all the fuss about it?  Why do so many people get so upset when "immoral acts" are committed?  Why have there been so many books written about it?  Why have so many individuals suffered as a result of acting in an "immoral" way?

Again, it comes back to safety and stress.  The only reason I can see why anyone cares about morality at all is that a moral group is a group that is safer for its members, which lowers stress and increases the odds of continued existence.  Morality is the means by which we put into thought and into words the instincts that have evolved in us, and that we cannot possibly avoid.

And it doesn't just apply to murder.  As far as I can tell, there is no act carried out by a human that doesn't conform in some way to an instinctive drive mediated/tweaked/altered by socialization.

Science & philosophy: similar in their difference

This is a small contribution to the on-going discussions about the "merits" of philosophy viz-a-viz science.  It seems that there's one camp, including Jerry Coyne, Larry Moran, and many others (including me) who have come to believe that philosophy's contribution to understanding reality is largely over and done.  Then there's another camp - including (not surprisingly) a whole bunch of philosophers - who think philosophy is as important today as it ever has been.

I've already written a tiny bit about it.  Basically, I see religion as Understanding Reality 1.0, philosophy as Understanding Reality 2.0, and science as the current 3.0 version.  There's no question that that philosophy has had a tremendous impact and is foundational to the establishment of science.  But it's not really done much for science lately.

Given science's status as philosophy's progeny, it should not surprise to find certain rather deep similarities as well as differences.  Here's a similarity that I've really only noticed in the last few months: in all the discussions I've read about science versus philosophy, there's a particular fundamental adherence by both camps to a certain stance.  I find that the differences between their respective stances are fundamental to the friction between them.

First, though, a disclaimer.  I do not mean to paint all philosophers and all scientists with the same two brushes here.  I know there are many philosophers, and many scientists, who do not fall into the two categories I'll describe.  However, it seems that the argument of science versus philosophy is largely between those philosophers and scientists who do fall into these two categories.  To try to avoid over-generalizing, I will write about two stances rather than two groups of individuals.

Also, I do not mean to imply that these two stances are the only two possible stances.  These are just the two stances that seem to me to be pertinent to the whole philosophy versus science thing.

The philosophical stance is one in which the proper formation of an argument is the only thing that matters, and that the validity of the premises are entirely irrelevant.  That is, when this stance is invoked, the entire argument is placed within a conditional: if the premises are true, then....  This means that holders of this stance are perfectly happy to accept arguments that have ludicrous premises so long as the arguments themselves are properly formed.

Example #1. I recently attempted to suggest to Richard Carrier, a well-known expert in History, that some of his arguments may be driving a greater wedge between scientists and philosophers, when we should be working together more closely.  Based on what I've read of his work, I can't see my point being especially controversial to him.  However, I suppose the form of my argument wasn't good enough, for he tore me a new one.  (The post in question is here.)

I mean, considering how fucked up the world is today, and considering the potential for good that exists both in philosophy and science, doesn't it make sense that we should waste our time arguing amongst ourselves?  Mightn't one at least acknowledge the desirability of the goal while at the time suggesting how to argue the point better?  Wouldn't that be better than just denying the entire thing because of some (possible) flaws in form?  If the goal is worthy, isn't it better to work together to address the flaws than to just denounce the entire discussion?

Example #2.  In a recent post in his excellent blog, Larry Moran writes:

It was a real eye-opener to hear Elliot Sober defend creationism by arguing that supernatural beings could have guided evolution by making undetectable changes in DNA [The Problem with Philosophy: Elliot Sober]. Sober is a highly respected philosopher. He doesn't believe in supernatural beings but his argument in defense of guided evolution was the subject of a lecture at the University of Chicago. Listen to the questions and discussion on the video and you'll see that a group of prominent philosophers actually take this sort of thing seriously.

Again we have a philosopher who doesn't believe in the supernatural, extolling arguments that can be applied to the supernatural. He's trying to make an excellent argument without worrying at all about the validity of the premises.  The suspect nature of the premises is apparent from Larry Moran's Evil Aliens analogy.  Indeed, the analogy underscores that the focus of the philosophical stance that Sober assumes is on the argument and not at all on the premises.

The philosophical stance, then, is that what matters and, by corollary, the premises are essentially irrelevant.

The scientific stance is similar to the philosophical stance in that there's a tenet that characterizes the stance that some scientists don't recognize as a premise.  The tenet is this: follow the evidence.  Theory is subordinate to the evidence, in that a theory is only as good as the evidence that supports it.  If there was compelling evidence that the moon is made of blue cheese, then the scientist who adopts this stance would be compelled to accept that the moon is made of blue cheese.  I think that this stance amounts to saying that the premises of an argument are at least as important as the form of the argument, and that an argument with questionable premises is as meaningless as one of questionable form.

This is often exemplified in arguments for evolution and even against religion and god.  That is: many scientists have stated that they accept evolution because it best explains the evidence and provides powerful predictive ability.  Similarly, many scientists have said that they would accept the existence of (some) god if the evidence in its favour were compelling.

In the scientific stance, one does not believe in the premises or the conclusions of scientific arguments.  Rather, the beliefs of the scientific stance are on the method of science.  The evidence is accepted if it meets standards that are believed (with good reason) to be robust, and the conclusions are accepted if they are believed (with good reason) to be robust.

Of course, the evidence for which one would search depends on existent science - thus the scaffolding of scientific knowledge extending through the centuries.  Of course, if we discovered a flaw in some old yet still accepted theory of science - say, Classical Mechanics - then a great deal of what constitutes the scientific body of knowledge would also be suspect.  That is just a risk that we face with science.  And yet, the success of science in predicting so much suggests that while our models are certainly imperfect, they are rather close to the mark.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I would summarize the difference between the two stances as one focuses on the form of arguments, whereas the other focuses on the premises.  The fact that each stance has a specific focus is, to me, the similarity between them.

Of course, this is exactly where the philosophical stance and the scientific stance conflict.  The philosophical stance seems to have a very hard time accepting the imperfect nature of establishing the validity of the premises, because, in the end, premises are based on perception, observation, and information that we gather imperfectly from outside ourselves.  On the other hand, once one has the premises, the entire body of the argument can be run essentially internally to the mind and without any recourse to external inputs.  The philosophical stance seems to prefer the "perfection" of the purely abstract reasoning of argumentation to the imperfect - impure - nature of evidence.

Now, I have to side with the scientists here.  This is because science really does subsume a very significant portion of philosophy, and in addition applies certain standards of quality to the premises.  It not only covers what is logically possible, but also what is most plausible from the evidence.  And science has been incredibly successful, even with its inherent imperfections.

In closing, I return to my notion of religion, philosophy, and science forming an evolutionary path, one that might be represented as:

1. Religion started as an attempt to explain stuff in an entirely ad-hoc way, based on evolved instinct (e.g. self-preservation, social instincts, etc), and common experience. As such it was (and still is) in constant need of revision and re-interpretation.
2. Philosophy is an improvement on religion in that it established certain methods of reasoning that allowed a consistency of results that religion simply cannot offer.
3. Science builds on philosophy by adding requirements for robustness not only of the methods of reasoning, but also of the premises used.

A thought on the evolution of religion, philosophy, and science

I'm keeping this one short in an attempt to stop certain philosophers changing this into an examination of the form of my argument rather than its point.  All the documentation supporting the statements I make about the histories of science, philosophy, and religion are easily available with a few Google searches.

There is evidence of religion going back hundreds of thousands of years, in the form of burial rituals.  Organized religion, of the general form we know today, emerged around 12,000 years ago.  It provided answers (albeit ridiculous ones by modern standards) to why things were as they are, which alleviated stress in the community by lessening what is unknown.  Unknown = danger = stress.  It also provided a power structure around which to organize the community.

Philosophy began within the last 3,000 years, depending on which culture you're considering.  However you define "philosophy," it started long after religion.  Philosophy sought answers to more or less the same questions as religion - it only phrased them more precisely.  ("What does it mean to be?" versus "What is my purpose?")  Still, philosophy was fundamentally about explaining and predicting reality.  The power structure of philosophy came from ability to reason - those who could reason had an advantage over those who could not.  Knowledge is power, as they say.

Science is a bit harder to nail down.  Some people argue that the formalization of mathematics represents the establishment of science.  I disagree, because mathematics is a broad tool that can be applied to things other than science; that is, it isn't a marker of science only.  It's also important to distinguish between natural philosophy and science as we understand it today.  The real distinguishing feature of science is the establishment of the scientific method, which is only about 300 years old.  Science serves exactly the same societal purpose as religion and philosophy: understanding provides safety and power.

So religion came first; then came philosophy; then came science.  If we think of it as an evolutionary tree, it starts with religion, then philosophy splits off from it, and then finally science splits off from philosophy, by way of the "transitional form" of natural philosophy.  Note that, unlike natural evolution, all three major disciplines still exist.

The evolution of these three fields was spurred by the ever-growing body of knowledge that they themselves generated.  It's a positive feedback loop: the more we learn, the better we understand, the more we can refine and improve our means of learning.  There is little doubt that science is the best we've got.  It improves in every possible way on its ancestors.

So the question is: why do the progenitor disciplines continue to exist un-evolved*, like coelacanths and sharks?  I will offer this suggestion of an explanation.

Biological species evolve in response to changes in their environment that alter the rate of survival of a genetically diverse population.  Coelacanths, sharks, and similar animals have remained essentially unchanged because the changes to their environment were insufficient to alter their rate of survival.

I think the reason why religion and philosophy survive and haven't been completely been replaced by science because there are environmental "pockets" where they remain viable.  These pockets aren't defined by geography or other physical characteristics, but rather by the personalities and socio-cultural norms of societies and communities.  As old people die and are replaced by young people, the young can be indoctrinated (brainwashed) in ways that ensure an unchanging environment.

Perhaps at some point in the future, some new way of learning will be developed that will make science look as ridiculous to some future human as religion does to a scientist of today.  The difference will be (I believe and hope) that science will recognize the superiority of that better way of learning about the universe and will willingly accept it.  More than philosophy and definitely more than religion, science ought to be expected to welcome that improvement.  Which is just another way that science beats its progenitors.

* Some may argue that philosophy has greatly evolved in the last few millennia, and they would be, in my opinion, partly right.  There continues to be a great deal that philosophy can contribute to humanity's advancement.  But there are also fields within philosophy that are stuck in modes of thinking that are, quite frankly, useless.  And because they are useless, they distract others from, and waste resources that would be better applied to, more important questions.

Sometime, deriding the messenger is necessary

This is Alexander Lucie-Smith, and he is hateful, incompetent, and deceitful.

He recently offered us a whole wheelbarrow of tripe in The tragedy at the heart of New Atheism.  Jerry Coyne has already torn apart his goofball sophistry, as has Eric MacDonald.  I, instead, want to write about another aspect of the behaviour of nutjobs like Lucie-Smith: that not only their vile ideas but they themselves deserve our derision and ridicule for the lies they tell and the harm they promote.

There are many atheists and humanists who advocate ridiculing only certain ideas and not those who hold such ideas.  The premise is that anyone can be wrong.  The indoctrination of the young to religulous dogma, for example, is quite powerful and if it is just a quirk of circumstance that one has been brainwashed by [insert any religion here], then we cannot truly blame one for espousing stupid, hateful ideas.

Fair enough.  But that does not describe every religulous fundiot.  Some of them clearly have the brains, the education, and the resources to learn from their mistakes.  Instead, these people exhibit either incredible sloth, or incompetence, or malevolence, or some combination of the three.  And they do so repeatedly.  When one keeps repeating the same mistakes, using the same wretched arguments, despite having been shown (sometimes in dozens of different ways) the specific errors one committed and even how those errors might be corrected - well, we must then revisit our strategies.

What do one do when, no matter how often one leads a horse to water, the horse patently refuses to drink - to even acknowledge the water is there?  This is exactly what these religulous fundiots do. Even worse, not only do the religulous deny the water of scientific truth that we offer to them; they even seek to deny these truths to others, and to confound the undecided with lies and vacuous arguments.

What do we do?  This is more than just some brainwashed Mormon peddling their paper mache god on a street-corner.  This is intentional, wilful, repeated subversion of truth and well-being for the sake of their stupid, hateful fairy tales.  What to do with people who wilfully seek to spread lies, over and over again, fully knowing - or at least having the capacity to know - that their lies promote hate and harm?

Is it enough to simply argue against their ideas?

Why do repeat criminals end up in prison for longer and longer periods of time?  Because it becomes apparent that society cannot fix them, so exile becomes the only feasible way to maintain the safety and peace of the society.

When will we finally realize that there is no difference between criminal recidivism and the religulous who repeatedly lie and spread harm through their religion?

It cannot possibly be enough to just ridicule religulous ideas.  This is because there will always be more wilfully ignorant, hate-mongering assholes to argue against you.  You can't destroy a bad idea if there is a steady supply of morons ready to take it up.  Indeed, the idea is pointless without the dumb-fuck, witless, hateful agent to promulgate it.  They are religious recidivists.

Clearly, such people are mentally ill.  Anyone who prefers lies to truth and harm to well-being is nuts, by definition.  But society - even so-called "developed" Western society - is quaintly parochial in naming this delusion where religion is concerned.

Did you know that the DSM has a special exemption for religious beliefs under the diagnosis of delusion?  This is because without it virtually everyone who holds religious beliefs above scientific knowledge would be labelled mentally ill.  (Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, quotes page 765 of the DSM-IV to this effect.)

So we can't just round up the religulous fundiots and lock them up - exile them - even though that is certainly the most rational course of action given what we know.

What else can we do but deride and ridicule the messenger?  Medical science, as it is currently practised, takes delusion as a mental illness - unless the delusion is religious.  God disguises himself as a lunatic.  Or maybe he's just a lunatic disguised as a god.  (Which is more likely?)  Still, the current social norm is that the religulous are sane.  If they are sane, and we have established they are both educated and intelligent, then they must be malevolent.  There is no other option.

The malevolent must be dealt with.  They must be stopped.  They must be shown to be the useless bags of skin they really are.  Since we cannot provide them with the psychiatric help they so obviously and desperately need, we can only convince them to shut up.  They must be prevented from influencing others by any legal and ethical means possible, because every time they open their mouths, they harm others.  So we really should not hesitate to yell and drown them out; to make fun of them, belittle them, ridicule them.  Their ideas are nothing without vessels, and we cannot stop people from thinking stupid things.  But by damn we can stop them from acting on those ideas.

So, to Alexander Lucie-Smith, beady-eyed whack-job that he is, I say this: your puerile ideas have been utterly demolished by others.  But that's not enough.

With reference to the putrefaction in your article, Lucie-Smith:

• You are so stupid that you are unable to use an internet search engine to find that quote of Richard Dawkins.
• You are so unethical, that you didn't even try - you could have asked someone else to do it for you, in the spirit of journalistic integrity.  But why should you care about that, when Christianity is just one big fucking lie?
• You are incompetent as a writer and communicator, constructing the kinds of arguments I would have been ashamed to present when I was a freshman, let alone a doctor of moral theology.
• Your flaccid arguments are an insult to academe, and show a complete disregard for the conduct of research and argumentation.  Whatever institution bestowed your doctorate clearly caters to idiots and assholes.
• Your arguments appeal entirely to the visceral, irrational, animalistic ignorance of theists.  In so doing, you foment hatred of rationality.
• This in turn belies utter contempt for your readers and humanity in general.

You, Alexander Lucie-Smith, are a repugnant slug who hates humanity.  Perhaps if you'd not been skull-fucked by your church quite so severely, you might understand that.  But you have willingly let your brains be liquified by the horror of the Catholic church because you are deficient, you are malevolent, you are sadistically narcissistic.  You are not fit to wipe the shit from my ass and I will never, ever, think of you as anything but the fucktard you really are.

---

(Sidebar: if the Catholic Church really gave a shit at all about anyone, they would have arranged for the brainless Lucie-Smith to be severely and publicly castigated for his contemptible and dismissive article.  Instead, Ratzy the Nazi remains silent.  Silence gives consent.  So the entire Catholic church is just as guilty, just as hateful, and just as fucked up, as the nutless wonder Lucie-Smith.)

Hope is nothing special

Here's the most recent tripe at our local Baptist church.  I unfortunately drive by the place quite often, and this one just kept getting under my skin....  I had to write about it.

First off, it's a bit of a non-sequitur, because the antecedent ("endless hope") says nothing about the condition of the consequent (an "end").  That is, having endless hope does nothing to necessarily prevent an end, hopeless or otherwise.  So this gets a solid F for composition.

Next, there is the insulting nature of the message: non-Christians are doomed to terminal despair simply because of their choice to worship a non-Christian god or no gods at all.  They may as well have just announced that non-Christians will burn in hell.  The sanctimonious arrogance of these people, who think that they have a fast track to a delusional ever-lasting life, shows such contempt for human life that it turns my stomach.  So in the category of empathy and respect for others, this gets another F.

Next: the use of the word "Christian."  Baptists aren't Protestants because they disagree with Protestant doctrine.  By definition, Baptists think that their way is the only right way, or they wouldn't have felt the need to form a new religion.  This necessarily means a good and proper Baptist must believe that non-Baptists are heathen, regardless of whether they're Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Pastafarian, or Jedi.  (Of course, the exact same argument can be levelled at every other sect of Christianity and, indeed, all religions.)  So why are they clumping all Christians together in their signage?  Personally, I think it's because they would rather put up with a Catholic than a Muslim or - horror of horrors - an atheist.  I think that many believers of the more insignificant religions, like Baptists, figure that there's strength in numbers, and so are willing to band together with other Christians to combat their perceived common enemies.  Religiously, they're Baptists; but politically, they're Christians.

Whatever the reason, the point remains: to comment on Christians as a whole runs entirely counter to their very existence.  (Not to mention it speaks on the behalf of those from whom consent was not granted.)  So, the scope of their argument is entirely wrong, and deserves an F.

Here's another problem with this statement: it's factually wrong.  Of course, facts have never been known to influence the religulous, so I am not surprised that these Baptists are simply cherry-picking the evidence to support their trite delusions.  There are, in fact, all kinds of people who live wonderful, fulfilling, happy, meaningful lives without religion and without god.  They die in peace and without regret.  That such people exist entirely undermines the claim the Baptists make.  So, for fact-checking: F.

Now let's consider hope itself.  Hope is "the emotional state which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life." (source)  If you don't like Wikipedia, then use this more academic definition: "Hope is...the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways." (source)

Furthermore, in religious parlance, hope is almost always about entering heaven.  Let's run with that for a moment.

Once you die, in typical Christian belief systems, there's nothing more you can do to affect the odds of your getting into heaven or hell.  Depending on the sect to which you belong, you may or may not have to wait till Armageddon/Judgement-Day/Rapture/whatever to actually get anywhere, but as of your mortal death, you're ticket is stamped, your fate sealed, your gig utterly and completely up.  Given either of the definitions of hope that I provided, you simply don't need any hope when you die.  Hope is about events and goals in one's life.  Death is the final event, and once you're dead, you're also completely out of agency to achieve goals.  Your god's decision regarding your ultimate fate doesn't depend on anything after your death.  The decision is in essence made when you die.

Hope, in the religious sense, is pointless at one's death, and irrelevant thereafter.  Therefore, it makes sense that everyone, even the religulous, should meet a hopeless end!  Clearly, these Baptists were more concerned with creating a good sound bite - something, dare I say, tweetable - than with offering an accurate statement.  So, in the category of depth of analysis, they get a resounding F.

Now let's look at hope more broadly.  Clearly, hope is just belief and not knowledge.  Whether it's about "positive outcomes" or about reaching "desired goals," hope is really about desire.  Hope is about wanting things to turn out.  We don't hope that things go badly.  We don't hope that terrible things happen to others (unless of course such terrible things result in "good" feelings in us, like vengeance, in which case we're really just hoping to feel good).

Unless one is mentally ill, the things one wants, the things one hopes for, are "good" things.  We hope for health, wealth, happiness, security, safety, etc.  And this is, as I see it, the key to understanding hope.  We have evolved to seek situations with the least stress.  A stressed organism will not produce as many offspring, and what offspring are produced will tend to be weaker and sicklier than those of organisms that are not stressed.  Stresses come from sources that organisms cannot control - their environments.  Stress serves the purpose of warning the organism of impending danger, so it is useful, but only to a point.  Organisms that learned how to adapt to stress produced more, healthier offspring, and so eventually overwhelmed organisms unable to adapt to stress.  Since the environment is always changing, there are always new kinds of stress, so those organisms that can adapt the best, the most often, and the most quickly, will eventually out-reproduce other organisms. And so, eventually, all organisms will have an innate drive to seek out low-stress situations (or, alternatively, to avoid situations of high stress).

For a very long time, organisms were insufficiently complex to reflect, to have self-image, to reason about time, and to build mental models of their world with themselves in the models.  Humans are one of the few organisms that can do these things.  Once you can reason about your own mental models, you can start to imagine possible future worlds.  You will naturally prefer those possible worlds in which you believe you will have less stress than you do in the actual, current world.  Those are precisely the worlds that we hope for.

We call it hope, rather than just rational preference, because it isn't rational; it isn't the result of careful and conscious thought processes.  It is the hardwired instinct to avoid stress that hands us our preferred worlds.  It is cognition, but not conscious cognition.  It's stuff the brain does without bothering to tell us.  Instead, the results of that cognition alone are shown to our conscious minds.  The result is that we perceive these preferences appearing as if from nowhere, popping fully formed into consciousness.  It's not rational thought, but it is something that presses on us, exerts its influence on us directly and powerfully.

Hope is something humans have been doing for a very long time - far longer than we have been thinking rationally.  It stands to reason that this feeling would have been captured and packaged into a concept ingrained in every human culture.  It also stands to reason that its universal applicability to direct us toward outcomes that make us literally "feel better" will have made it a magic incantation of any organization seeking to give relief or to control others.

And what hope could possibly be more powerful than that of a kind of existence that is utterly stress-free?  That's what heaven is: the ultimate stress-free environment.

But that doesn't make hope anything special.  It's an tool in our evolutionary tool-belt, a neat trick that our brains have learned to do over the eons.  It helped us make choices more likely to result in our survival and the propagation of our genetic material when we were too primitive to make decisions rationally.  We know better know.

Don't get me wrong: hope is still useful, exactly because it lowers stress and therefore improves our overall health.  And it feels good.  But it has no superior force, it is no guiding light, it represents no true way to fulfilment.

And hope does carry costs.

Since hope works at the instinctual, visceral level, there's no way to know if hope's object is reasonable.  What if the positive outcome or desired goal of a hope is ludicrous or impossible?

There is such a thing as "false hope" - hope in the impossible or even just highly unlikely.  Such hope is false because hope itself is not enough to make the positive outcome occur or reach the desired goal.  This is important: hope is not enough.  When our hopes are not realized, because they were false, we often suffer emotionally and mentally if not physically.  The greater the false hope, the potentially greater the catastrophe that follows its destruction.  For instance, I cannot imagine the psychological pain suffered by parents who deny their child medical treatment on religious grounds, only to have the child die; it must be excruciating.

Not only that, but false hope leads one to action, like laws permitting parents to make choices regarding their children's medical care that substantively increases the odds of suffering and death.  False hope can permeate a society like a drug addiction, giving one temporary solace or even joy, but doing irreparable harm in the long term.

And all this derives because some people refuse to acknowledge that their hope is just instinctive and not necessarily correct.

So, here's what I say: hope may be fine as a default, when no other, better, rational information is available; but aside from that, hope is useless.

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Suggested Reading:

• R.M. Nesse. 1999. The Evolution of Hope and Despair. Social Research 66(2).
• Unfortunately, many other interesting articles are behind pay-walls.

Our Lady of Guadalupe visits Jersey

Courtesy PuffHo.

A few days ago, there were varied reports of a defect on a tree in West New York (which is apparently in New Jersey) that looked like the virgin Mary - and the famous Our Lady of Guadalupe in particular.  The religulous went predictably nuts over it.

The local archdiocese called it only a "phenomenon," but that wasn't enough to stop the faithful from acting like teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert.  (There's videos of the foolishness at PuffHo.)

Here's my favorite explanation: it's a coincidence.  That is to say, if I could examine every tree in the world, I'll bet I can find all manner of shapes.  I'll bet you I can find... Jimmy Durante!  Would that mean Jimmy is still with us?  That Jimmy is god?  Of course not.  In our fantastically diverse universe, all kinds of things look like all kinds of other things.

Courtesy Astrobioblog.

Wait.  That's no moon!

See what I mean?

So why does a worn bit of tree truck make some people freak out so much?  Because they're biased.  They're predisposed to take certain coincidences as significant only because they've been primed by years of brainwashing to do so.  But if the image had been of anything that fell even slightly outside the usual religious memes - well, then it would have just been a mark on a tree.

...hang on; I'll be right back.

Just to show you how easy it is to see things that aren't there: I just went outside and looked around my front yard.  Within two minutes, I'd found something amazing - The All-seeing Eye!

Yes, this is in my front yard.

These are all cases of something called pareidolia and it's a very well-documented phenomenon.  One of the key abilities of living organisms is to pattern match.  Being able to pattern match a tiger hiding in the shrubbery went a long way to helping our progenitors survive.  It's something the brain can do without conscious thought, so it just happens whether we want it to or not.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that we see things - even when we see puppies in the shapes of clouds - that aren't really there.

And under pretty much every other circumstance but the religious one, any reasonably mature human will recognize the oddity as just coincidence.

But when it comes to religion, all bets are off.

I think this really underscores the insidious nature of religious belief: it puts one in a frame of mind that blocks our rational brain from drawing correct conclusions; it obscures our rationality; it deprives us of one of the few characteristics that make humans distinctive among all the forms of life on Earth.

Really now.  Can't we do better than this?

(For the record, when I look at that tree in West New York, I see a dildo.  Just sayin'.)