The Questioning Christian

Category: Evolution

  • The evolution of social skills may be what has advanced humans over lower primates

    A recent study suggests that what sets us humans apart from our chimpanzee- and orangutan “cousins” might not be any difference in intelligence (which doesn’t seem to be especially pronounced).  Instead, the crucial difference may be the ability we have evolved to empathize with and to learn from each other, in ways that lower primates don’t seem to be capable of.

    Human beings have evolved to coordinate complex activities, to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities — and not because of their cleverness as individuals — that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.

    Of course, humans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.”

    Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.”

    The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today.

    The solution — more easily said than done — is to find new ways to define the group.

    Michael Tomasello, How Are Humans Unique?, NY Times, May 25, 2008 (extra paragraphing added).

    If this aspect of human evolution has been part of an ongoing continuing creation, it’s pretty damned clever of the Creator, wouldn’t you say?

  • Your gold jewelry came from a supernova explosion

    A powerful event in my faith journey was when I began to grasp how creation has been an ongoing process. It’s exemplified by the way a supernova explosion — which has to be about the best example there is of complete and utter destruction — manufactures the elements (literally) of new planets and of life here on earth. As one astronomer told a New York Times reporter, “If you’re wearing gold jewelry, it came from a supernova explosion.” See Dennis Overbye, Scientists See Supernova in Action – New York Times, May 22, 2008.

  • Jesus’ mission was a bust – at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

    Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me “what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, “since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

    ————————

    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

    ————————

    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

    Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

    ————————

    What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

    • The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

    • History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

    • On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

    For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

    ————————

    Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

    If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.

  • America sorts itself out geographically into blue- and red zones

    From William A. Galston & Pietro S. Nivola, “Vote Like Thy Neighbor,” NY Times, May 11, 2008 (bold-faced emphasis added):

    … during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

    Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become supermajorities. This is consistent with the findings of recent political science and social psychology: individuals in the minority of their group tend to shift their views toward the majority, while members of the majority become more extreme in their views. In such circumstances, discussions within groups often intensify, rather than moderate, the underlying polarization.

  • Being smart can be bad for your health – NY Times

    From Carl Zimmer, Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better, NY Times, May 6, 2008:

    Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others.  One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

    * * *

    The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues. For many animals, learning mainly offers a benefit in finding food or a mate. But humans also live in complex societies where learning has benefits, as well.

    Read it all.

  • In the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news – Nick Bostrom

    There’s a fascinating piece by physicist-philosopher Nick Bostrom in MIT’s Technology Review.  Dr. Bostrom, of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, mulls over Fermi’s Paradox: the conjecture that if intelligent life were common in the universe, then we humans should have seen signs of it by now.

    (For example, given the number of stars in the observable universe, one or more species likely would have achieved interstellar travel, even if only by self-replicating robots, which arguably we should have encountered by now.)

    That we have not detected signs of intelligent life elsewhere, says Bostrom, suggests that there is a Great Filter that has prevented life from making it that far into space.  The filter could be that life itself is extremely hard to get started. That would be good news for us, inasmuch as we’ve already made it past that hurdle; it would mean that the Great Filter lies behind us in our existence as a species. 

    The bad news would be if life proved comparatively easy to start, but difficult to sustain long enough to colonize interstellar space. This implies that existential doom may well await us in the future. 

    And that, says Bostrom, is why:

    … It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.

    Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form–some bacteria, some algae–it would be bad news.

    If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news.

    The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly–but a bad omen for the future of the human race.

    (Extra paragraphing added; hat tip: O’Reilly Radar.)

    This is a major thought-provoker – definitely read it all.

  • Evolutionary basis for Spitzer’s adultery?

    Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier has a piece today in the NY Times about the rarity of monogamy in animal species:

    … Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy.

    Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.

    Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.

    (Extra paragraphing added.)

    Evolutionary psychologists and social biologists tend to think that this furtive, uneasy coexistence of monogamy and promiscuity arises from a confluence of genetic- and social factors:

    • All of us are descendants of ancestors who, by definition, did at least the minimum necessary to pass on copies of their genes to another generation.
    • Statistically, a father who cheats on his mate is likely to pass on more copies of his genes than one who doesn’t cheat (because he’s more likely to have a greater number of offspring).
    • Other things being equal, a mother who tries to enforce fidelity in her mate is more likely to have help, economic and otherwise, in raising her offspring; this ups the odds that her offspring will survive to reproductive age and pass on copies of her genes (and their fathers’) to grandchildren.
    • On average, mothers who cheat are likely to diversify the genetic risk portfolio of their offspring, because of the increased odds that their offspring will be fathered by several different males of varying genetic profiles.
    • When parents stay together to help with the raising of their grandchildren, it enhances even further the odds of that parents’ genes will survive into future generations.

    In short, from a purely-pragmatic perspective, both monogamy and promiscuity have their evolutionary advantages.

    I suspect this is another example of the watermelon-seed effect, in which opposing forces — in this case, the desire for both sexual freedom and a faithful mate — can unexpectedly result in progress (cf. the Hegelian dialectic).

  • Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million Templeton Prize

    From today’s NY Times:

    The $1.6 million Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?” …

    Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God.

    In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot.

    Professor Heller said he believed, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”

  • A response to an inquiring non-believer

    Commenter Jason, who seems to be related to ee cummings <g>, asks some good questions this morning about a posting I did a few years ago: 

    … as a non-believer (some call me atheist), this has been an intriguing article to stumble upon. frankly, i am at a loss as to understand how you can display such sound logic and skepticism, yet at the same time maintain a claim to be christian, or even religious at all. …

    … you say you are christian, which is to say that you do in fact have faith about certain metaphysical matters. how can you believe in a heaven or hell if the very source and support for that idea is something that you admit is not reliable? 

    … please contact me. your position is very interesting and new to me, as such i believe i can learn quite a bit from you.

    Jason, I’m very glad you wrote. I’ll try to respond succinctly, and I’m grateful to you for providing the impetus to do so. 

    Christian is as Christian does

    I don’t agree that, to call yourself a Christian, you have to "have faith about certain metaphysical matters."  That puts me at odds with a large number of people who think that, to be a Christian, you have to believe in, for example, original sin and salvation through Jesus’ atoning death.  Personally, I’m not persuaded about these things (except to the extent that original sin is a metaphor for our inherent imperfection).  I reject the idea that this disqualifies me from being a Christian, or from being ‘saved,’ whatever that means.

    I think the Jesus described in the New Testament had a very different view than do these latter-day Christians. Jesus the Jewish reformer seemed to want people simply to serve God and one another.  He stressed, correctly in my judgment (more about which below), the importance of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law, which I would paraphrase along the following lines: 

    Acknowledge the Creator and commit your whole being to serving ‘his’ purposes. In particular, seek the best for your neighbor just as you do for yourself; and keep in mind that ‘your neighbor’ is not just your kinsman or countryman, but anyone who crosses your path, even your people’s hereditary enemy. 

    In response to a question from an expert in Torah, Jesus is reported to have said, "do this and you will live [eternally]."  (Luke 10.25-37.) 

    If we’re to believe Jesus, it would seem that anyone who does these things may claim the title of "Christian," no matter what particular theological doctrines they happen to believe to be true.   

    FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends will scoff that the preceding paragraph smacks of salvation by good works, which is anathema to many Protestants, instead of by faith. They argue that you cannot be ‘saved’ unless your faith is such that you truly "love the Lord."  My response is that people usually can’t control whether they "love" someone as we understand the term, so Jesus must have meant that we should <em>serve</em> God and our neighbor.  Moreover, serving God and others by doing good works can cause a change of mind and heart — Greek: metanoia, usually translated as "repentance" — which can lead to precisely the faith that some Christians insist is a prerequisite to salvation. 

    FOOTNOTE:  It’s hard to believe (and we have no evidence) that God would punish someone for failing to believe the "right" things: so far as I can tell, what we happen to believe is something over which we have little or no volitional control.  Of course, we can indeed sometimes talk ourselves into believing that which we really want to believe, regardless whether it’s true.

    Motivation:  Reasons for doing what Jesus said to do

    Of course we have to ask why we should seek to follow the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law. After all, as many have pointed out, these injunctions are by no means unique to Christianity; they come from Torah and are manifested in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

    For many if not most Christians, the principal motivation is the claim that Jesus was God Incarnate, and therefore we should do what he said. I’m afraid that doesn’t do it for me, nor has it ever for the majority of the world’s population. Indeed, those of Jesus’ followers who actually knew him in life didn’t seem to think he was God.  So Jesus’ alleged divinity would not appear to require that we follow his teachings.

    My own motivation is largely pragmatic.  I’ve come to believe that, on the whole, following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law is humanity’s best bet for evolutionary success, and also for cosmic significance.  In particular:

    1. To me the evidence makes it quite likely that there is a Creator; undoubtedly not precisely like the God described in the Bible (who really knows?), but probably not entirely unlike that.

    2. At least locally, the universe hasn’t devolved into chaos, but has evolved into the relatively highly organized form we have today. And there’s not much doubt that this constitutes "progress" as we define it, because few if any people, at any time in history, would permanently trade places with a random  person who lived, say, 1,000 years previously.

    3. The Great Commandment and Summary of the Law "just works."  People who stay real, who don’t worship their own wishful thinking, but who instead
    live in the reality that the Creator wrought, are more likely to
    survive and reproduce.  And over the long term, altruistic cultures have proved more likely to survive and grow than narcissistic ones.

    All this suggests that the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law summarize one of the fundamental mechanisms by which the Creator’s universe is being caused to evolve.  They appear to be like laws of nature.  Doing the math, it seems entirely plausible that they were ordained by the Creator so that we would function as created co-creators in his continuing creation of the universe.

    This possibility is supremely exciting to me.  It might be just a matter of egotism, of my personal liking to be "where the action is," perhaps like Jesus’ disciples James and John (and their mother!) importuning him to name them his chief lieutenants . If that’s the case, it is what it is.

    I can’t be sure I’m right about this, of course.  But every day we make bets, choosing particular ways to conduct our lives on the basis of uncertain information.  This particular bet seems like an eminently worthwhile one.

    FOOTNOTE: For an account of how I arrived at the above beliefs, see this posting about Why I Still Call Myself a Christian, and an Episcopalian.

    FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends criticize me for relying on "private judgment" in reaching the conclusions above. Ultimately, I believe, it’s I who am responsible for use of whatever gifts of discernment and judgment have been entrusted to me.  (Cf. the Parable of the Talents.) Prudent stewardship of those gifts will often entail choosing to rely on the judgment of others smarter or more knowledgeable than I. But in the end, "the buck stops here"; I’m the one who is accountable for my stewardship.

    Faithfulness

    I also admire Jesus because he was faithful to his people and to God’s calling as he understood it. 

    True, some of his early followers believed he was the long-awaited Anointed One, a man designated by God to become the warrior-king who would soon return to rescue Israel from oppression and usher in the Kingdom of God. The New Testament claims that Jesus himself believed this (although personally I’m skeptical about that). None of this happened, of course.

    But that error is pretty inconsequential, as long as we’re willing to face the facts, and not insist on living in a fantasy world.  Jesus was human; being wrong on that point takes away nothing from his faithful pursuit of his duty as he saw it, even unto death.

    * * *

    Thanks again for writing, Jason, and please do so again. You might read some of the postings listed in the right-hand column, if you haven’t done so already.

  • Humans enforce fairness by punishing greed; chimpanzees don’t

    Humans’ willingness to enforce fairness by punishing greed — even when doing so is costly —appears to be a major advantage we enjoy over other primates, one that promotes collaboration and thus has underpinned human progress. So says The Economist, reporting on recent scientific research (hat tip: The Lead).

    (This evidence is consistent, it seems to me, with the possibility that love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself may be akin to a law of nature, a part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.)

    There’s a well-known experiment called the “ultimatum game.” Two people, call them “Alice” and “Bob,” have to decide how to divide, say, $100 between them. Alice proposes a split; Bob decides whether to accept or reject the split.

    The key to the ultimatum game is that if Bob rejects Alice’s proposed split, neither he nor Alice gets anything. You’d think Bob would agree to just about anything Alice proposed; even if he got only $1, with the other $99 going to Alice, that’d still be $1 more than he had before, so he’d be ahead of the game.

    But for reasons not fully understood, humans don’t play the game that way. If Alice were to get too greedy, Bob likely would reject her proposed split even though as a result he’d end up with nothing:

    Scores of studies have run the ultimatum game across cultures and ages. Universally, people reject any share lower than 20%—apparently to punish the greed of the proposer. People do not act like Homo economicus. Instead, they are the arbiters of fairness.

    (Emphasis added.)

    Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have found that chimpanzees evidently don’t share this willingness to punish greed. The Economist article points out that some evolutionary scientists believe humans’ innate willingness to punish notes:

    . . . Though [chimpanzee] proposers consistently chose the highest possible number of raisins for themselves, responders rarely rejected even the stingiest offers.

    This is a telling outcome. A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness—and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself—is humanity’s “killer app”. It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value.

    Dr Jensen’s previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another.

    (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)