Image by Karen .t from Pixabay
The following discussion about belief systems may seem out of place coming from a recovering astrophysicist, and perhaps I am as surprised as you are. But my path has taken me to an unexpected place, so that I now think we would be wise to make a radical course change at the deepest level of what we believe.
Why should we consider a major change?
- Because we don’t know everything, and never can.
- Because what we do know tells us we’re on the wrong track, initiating a sixth mass extinction—not just from CO2, but from modernity itself.
- Because we now (collectively) believe in the wrong things, like human supremacy and economics (gross).
- These beliefs are actively hurting the living creatures of the planet, including us.
Science has revealed so much about the origins and rules of the universe, and how life came to be so exquisitely diverse. Let’s tap into what this tells us. Let’s also acknowledge that mysteries will always remain. Rather than continue to be paralyzed in this urgent time by what we don’t yet know, let’s fill in the gaps with belief—or even faith—rooted in the science we already do know. Let’s move beyond the current stories we tell ourselves in modernity, and fashion new ones that move us in a better direction—to the enduring benefit of all life on Earth.
I’m not sure I know how to tell this story, so please bear with me and accept my apologies for a long-ish read. For those who saw last week’s post, this one contains familiar echoes, but represents a fresh approach intended for a more general audience.
Old Stories
I’ll start by pointing out that human cultures continue to tell some very old stories, and that stories with such staying power must be special in some way. They might resonate with some sense of inner truth, or provide a way to better explain the world we inhabit. But, notice that we sometimes use the word “stories” to mean lies—fabrications. Effective lies always contain a healthy dose of truth, or they would be instantly rejected as rubbish. In this sense, perhaps persistent stories also contain a healthy dose of truth—even if the overall message goes off the rails.
Whatever you think of the story from Genesis about Adam and Eve, and their fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, you’ll acknowledge that it has had incredible longevity—surviving for millennia. What is it about this sometimes-confusing story that works so well for people?
The Fall from Grace
As a recap of the story’s salient features, initially Adam and Eve roamed the Garden of Eden, eating its fruits and living a satisfied, carefree life. The only commandment they had to obey was not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree was for God alone.
When they succumbed to temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were forever banished from the Garden of Eden, with the following words (from Genesis):
Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground…
Man, that god sounds hangry! In any case, it was to be a hard-scrabble life of agricultural toil (with a death-bonus thrown in), which was a real downer after “having it made” in the Garden.
Another facet to the story that comes into play is that of Cain and Abel—sons of Adam and Eve. Cain made his living by tilling the earth, while Abel was a pastoralist: a sheep herder. They each offered gifts to God: Cain sacrificed grass and seeds, while Abel sacrificed a sheep. God accepted Abel’s gift, while rejecting Cain’s. In a jealous rage, Cain killed his brother, Abel—then went on to become a builder of cities.
These story elements are confusing. As our culture is based on agriculture, and we praise knowledge, technology, and innovation, why would eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil be a bad thing? Why would this transformation from an age of childlike innocence to an age of farming and dominion over land and animals be cursed? Isn’t this the spark that set us on the path we were meant to follow—that we are indeed following?
It all makes much more sense if we allow that the original story was told by those outside the Adam-and-Eve clan. Imagine pastoralists in a territory bordering some upstart agriculturalists. What story would they tell? They might tell of a wayward group of humans who fell out of the natural way of living to conquer the land. They must have offended their god to have such a cruel fate of hard work forced upon them. Who are they, anyway, clearing land for fields and acting like they own the place—as if they were gods themselves? Maybe they actually think they’re gods! Maybe they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, even though everyone knows that the fruit only works for gods. Oh, but what if they don’t know that? What if they ate the fruit of the Tree, imagined themselves to have acquired godly wisdom, were punished by their actual god for the transgression, yet carried on as if possessing the ultimate wisdom? Yeah, that totally fits!
The Cain and Abel story also makes a lot more sense, in this light. The god of the people telling this story clearly favored pastoral life, and shunned the farmers—as evidenced by the acceptable form of sacrifice. For further evidence, what did the dastardly Cain become? He eradicated his pastoral brother-humans and became a builder of cities: of civilization. Aren’t we fans of civilization? Why associate that noble development with the villain of the story? This seems like a story most likely told by disgruntled folks displaced by agriculture and cities, then accidentally adopted by the culture it originally criticized.
Our Story
With that in mind, let’s tell our own story of creation. We will start with what we have learned from science. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago in a hot Big Bang. The sun and Earth formed out of gas and dust within the galaxy about 4.5 billion yeas ago. When Earth was cool enough, over uneventful stretches of time whose duration is utterly incomprehensible to us, chemistry and physics contrived to create arrangements capable of self-replicating, and the simplest life came into being on the planet.
What happened next is both simple and fascinating: selection. The better-suited a lifeform was to the environment, the more it thrived and became enmeshed in the community of life. We call this evolution, of course. The present offers a snapshot of evolution’s progress. It isn’t finished, and most of the species on the planet today are simply momentary waypoints along a twisted and intertwined set of tracks.
We all got here by following the rules of life. All along, every species had no choice but to obey the laws of physics—at all times. Physics plus complexity (molecules) makes chemistry. Chemistry plus complexity (cellular structures) gives biology, and biology plus complexity (life interactions) yields ecology. The other simple rule we all followed leads to evolution: success survives, failure disappears. The idea is so obvious, in hindsight, that it hardly needs articulating. Yet, if any species becomes too successful (like off-scale hunting capability), it depletes its environment too rapidly and fails. Every life operates in relation to other life, and evolution is fully in that context. Ecology pertains to the intricate and unknowable connections and dynamic balance among the species, all playing some part in the great ever-changing symphony that has been in a perpetual state of composition over eons.
Recasting the Story
Now we will tell the same story using different language. Imagine living 20,000 years ago, marveling at this astonishing world, and how all the plants and animals seem to have a role, in relationship. All seem to have figured out different ways to live in this world. All have their tricks and secrets. Through every winter, the turtles, wasps, newts, rabbits, chickadees, trees, and flowers survive and return. How do they manage? How might you make sense of it all?
A satisfying explanation is that you, like the other animals and plants, live in the hands of the gods. Without knowing how it happens, the world just seems to provide for you. How else would you have survived for all this time? You might experience hunger sometimes, but the gods see to it that something has always come along to save you in time. In modern understanding, we would say that every animal is contextualized to its environment, and of course the environment provides it with what it needs to survive and reproduce, or the species would not have had the option to stick around. Mere presence is a testament to long-term adequate provision. It is not complete random coincidence that something usually works out.
But back to the hands of the gods. Whoever or whatever they are, they sure are wise! They seem to know when the fox should catch the quail, and when the quail should escape. If the fox never caught the quail, it would disappear. If it always did, the quail would disappear and the fox along with it, without anything left to eat. Which outcome will happen today? Will the fox eat, or go hungry? If the latter, the quail survives to eat the grasshopper, which spares the grass.
In this tangled mess, what’s good for one creature might be called evil for another—sometimes, not all the time. How do the gods know when to mete out good or evil for any given critter on any given day?
Since we have known for ages that “you are what you eat,” wise gods must eat wise fruit. Aha! They know where to find the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! Having the wisdom that comes from this fruit, they are able to prevent an excess of good or evil from upsetting the overall stability and balance in the community of life. That job requires immense wisdom—far beyond the pay-grade of simple humans.
We got where we are (became humans) by our ancestors’ putting trust in the gods, living in their hands. As long as we made our best efforts, they saw to it that we found nourishment, evaded danger, and learned how to live together well enough to make it to today. They equipped us with some nifty features: flexible diet, dexterity, adaptability to many climates, complex social behaviors, and large brains to amplify all these traits. If we remain entrusted to their hands, we are likely to make it to tomorrow as well. If evil does befall us, it’s all in keeping with their infinite wisdom that we have no standing to question. We are no different from other animals, who also live in the hands of the gods, and also can expect to experience both good and evil in fair measure. Fairness, by definition, will not always appear to operate in our favor.
Back to Science
Okay, so we are not likely in the present day and age to subscribe to literal tales of wise gods with big hands—nor is it to be assumed that ancient tellers of such stories took them literally (seriously, yes). But we can connect the concepts to a more familiar realm. The actual biophysical world appears to operate in an approximate, dynamic equilibrium—setting aside the anomalous modern era for the moment. Even as the climate swings through ice ages and interglacial periods, life has been able to adjust and adapt. We understand this in an evolutionary context. Plants and animals that lack the flexibility to adapt are removed from the scene. What’s left are those able to live in rough balance in relation to the other survivors.
Because all species are locked in the dance together, no one who makes it gets an excess of “good” or an excess of “evil.” Evolution has culled those cases, exercising a form of final judgment. The wisdom behind the judgment is right there in the rules of selection.
But that is not the main source of wisdom. The main source is time. Every species alive today benefits from a several-billion-year heritage of trial and error, patiently honing attributes—judged by the simple metric of success or failure. While humans are only 3 million years old, and Homo sapiens a few hundred-thousand, our design relies heavily on the entire history of life. The simplest tasks of constructing cell walls, building proteins, replicating cells, and metabolizing food stretch back billions of years. The secrets for making muscle, skin, and bones likewise are as old as the hills. Much older, actually. Brains are not unique to humans, either. The basic structure of our brain is inherited from a very long line of evolutionary success stories.
Deep Time
This might all seem relatively obvious, but what may not be so obvious is what billions of years actually means. Having lifetimes that seldom stretch beyond 100 years, we can have no direct, visceral concept of what even 1,000 years feels like (though some trees can). A million years is one thousand of these long-ass millennia, which far exceeds our intuition. Now, a billion years is one thousand of these seemingly interminable eternities. We are woefully incapable of grasping such “deep time,” and what splendid diversity of shenanigans that allows.
Pay attention to that. Just as the mind of god is imagined to be unknowable to mere mortals, we can’t come close to fathoming the time and patience of evolution in shaping organisms that are able to work within the community of life. Sure, we marvel at the crazy dances of bower birds, the sonar capabilities of bats, the magnetically-aided navigational abilities of migratory animals, the intricate social structures of bee colonies, and all the rest. Those things merely hint at the impressiveness of deep time and the sophisticated capabilities that can develop in that context. If this idea doesn’t exceed your imaginative capacity, then you’re probably not absorbing the point well enough. This is way bigger than anything our brains can process.
Role of Religion
Precisely because evolution’s patient accomplishments are magnificent and unfathomable, human cultures have filled the void with stories of gods or (later) a god. The phenomenon of life on this planet simply demanded an explanation as grand and mysterious as the result. These godly beliefs reflect a tacit admission of our inferiority in comprehending how it could all work: we are nothing, in comparison to the gods of creation. Correct.
Modern secularists might see the religion impulse as the wrong track. But actually, it is rather astute: the world works in ways that we are incapable of fully understanding. We are therefore justified in telling stories to explain what’s missing. It just turns out that evolution may be that missing piece, often vastly under-appreciated for its depth. We have known about evolution for some time, but set it up as the anti-god, not as the god—not as a concept worthy of reverence and even worship for its embodied wisdom.
To be sure, many wonders in our world are not due to Darwinian evolution: stars and planets; sunsets and rainbows; geology and the rain that shapes it; etc. This stuff is just gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces (i.e., physics), driven by energy flow and entropy. As stated before, physics underwrites chemistry, which underwrites biology, which gives rise to ecology—guided by multi-level selection, or evolution. While we certainly appreciate the inanimate elements of our world, it is life that takes the cake, in our imaginations—and for good reason: it’s truly stunning!
In viewing “god” as physics, evolution, and the dazzling complexity that emerges, we need not diminish god’s magnificence, as the result is every bit as mysterious and unfathomable to warrant similar awe and humility. The actual wonderful world, as we find it, is not diminished one iota if our stories about it shift.
Humans in Context
Now, most agree that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet. No other species has devised means of accessing land, sea, air, and space. Yet, for all this off-scale intelligence, we are nothing to evolution. We are utterly incapable of designing even the simplest viable lifeform—especially if disallowing plagiarism of evolution’s solutions. No cheating! As such, evolution has FAR more power than we do. For all intents and purposes, evolution is omnipotent. Moreover, we ourselves are a product of evolution, so perhaps anything we do is actually evolution’s accomplishment also! It’s like creating a patent within a large organization: the organization owns the patent.
All the same, the jury (of the gods) is still out on how fit our intelligence will turn out to be. We already had a question mark by our species name prior to the agricultural revolution, due to megafauna extinctions. Since then, in a time fantastically short compared to evolutionary time scales, we’ve become quite the wrecking ball to the ancient community of life, effectively driving it over a cliff..
Intelligence is one of many tools in evolution’s box. Other attributes that confer advantage are things like speed, strength, sharpness of teeth/claws, camouflage, stealth, smallness, acuity in sight/sound/smell, dietary flexibility, dexterity, socialization—to name a few. Humans have a number of advantageous attributes, but intelligence is our most prized. The thing is, any of these attributes can be taken too far, becoming a liability. Evolution does not care about making mistakes. It’s actually little more than a huge mistake-machine. Some “mistakes” happen to work out, and new niches are filled as a result. Most go nowhere.
Thus, humans might well be more intelligent than the community of life can tolerate, though I certainly hope that does not prove to be the case. Lately, we have created our own context and rules, acting outside of evolutionary pressures that keep other species in balance. Perhaps most importantly, we have jumped the rails, off the slow track of evolution and onto a hypersonic rocket ship. While many applaud this impressive stunt, the rest of the community of life is unable to adapt to its ridiculous pace—tied as they are to the slower train of genetic evolution. We are living out of the hands of the gods that got us here, which is very risky. It is no coincidence that the sixth mass extinction appears to have begun, due to human activity.
In essence, we have thumbed our noses at the gods of evolution, promoting ourselves into the role of gods (more on this below). Many still worship a (usually single) god, but these religions tend to single out humans as the pinnacle of creation—granting to humans in the case of Genesis…
… dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
This is a problem. It gives me the creepeths.
Humans as Self-Styled Gods
So complete is our hubris that we tend to quickly dismiss the roles of physics and evolution that have defined who we are, imagining ourselves to be the masters—even of ourselves. In this view we no longer belong to the world: it belongs to us, and we were meant to rule it. We imagine that we have free will (note: separate from agency), granting a sort of override over mundane processes like physics and chemistry. This probably stopped a lot of readers in their tracks. Free will is indeed a sacred cow, which itself is fascinatingly revealing. Admittedly, the free will illusion—a powerful instinct—may very well be a deliberate adaptive strategy on the part of evolution, necessary for social species to operate with a sense of personal responsibility within a collective. I don’t want to be hubristic enough myself to challenge the wisdom in the illusion. But I can at least try to peer under the curtain, as I have done more thoroughly in a previous post and will return to again next week.
The point is, whether aware of it or not, we tend these days to think of ourselves as having godly powers. By this logic, we need not live in the hands of the gods (subject to evolution and its notions of parceling out good and evil). We are in control now. We make the rules. We are the new gods. We do what we want. Question: what happens in the old stories when a mortal challenges the power of the gods? Are they ever victorious? Watch out, there.
We simply do not (alone) possess the wisdom of billions of years to warrant the assumption of godly roles. When we attempt to mete out good and evil, we display a strong tendency to bestow the good on ourselves, leaving the evil to the non-human suckers who can go take a running leap, for all we care (a leap into the sixth mass extinction, it turns out). We can’t handle the responsibility, and nor were we designed to do so by evolution. We make poor gods, and would be wise to stop pretending.
Shortcut Beliefs
Believers in god(s) understandably see god(s) everywhere, as a foundational explanation for the multitude of unfathomable phenomena that the world presents to us. The same goes for free will: every action or decision seems to be sparked by something beyond mundane physics and chemistry. The combination of physics, evolution, and time, time, time, time, time, time, time, time, time (and much more time) is also capable of accounting for the amazingness of the world. Not all of these explanations are correct. Because the complexity emerging from the last one is likely beyond our cognitive capacity to fully grasp, we gravitate to the more facile, attractive, self-flattering, short-cut beliefs of god(s) and/or free will. Yet, evolution can account for the diverse array of life and its many incredible capabilities—and also for preparing brains to process complex decisions in a complex world that provide agency (ability to do stuff) aimed at facilitating successful outcomes.
This tendency to dismiss the “emergent complexity” explanation is, perhaps, another expression of hubris. If we can’t fit a whole idea into our head, we might reflexively reject it. The universe, however, is under no obligation to work in ways that our particular organism is equipped to fully comprehend. On the other hand, faith is a common element of religious belief, and one could imagine adopting faith that physics and evolution are capable of accounting for all that we see—even if exactly how it does so in all its detail remains forever mysterious to us.
Evolution as Religion
If physics and evolution are indeed able to account for biodiversity and all our experiences, then rather than kill the idea of god(s), they could potentially become our idea of god(s). They could evolve into a belief system that satisfies our affinity for religion. Here, I sketch out some initial thoughts on the tenets and likely results of such a belief system.
Tenet: The universe is not here for us, or because of us, or designed to lead to us. We are simply here because we can be. It would not be possible for us to find ourselves in a universe in which the rules did not permit our existence.
Result: Deep gratitude for the privilege of being here, alive. We are passing phenomena, and have the opportunity to enjoy our brief time.
Tenet: We are all nothing more than atoms in marvelously complex arrangements, capable of extraordinary interactions with other dynamic assemblages of matter—experiencing emotion, awareness, and a sense of agency along the way.
Result: Awe and marvel that this actually works—without any imperative to understand every detail (as we likely can’t), but no harm probing to learn more. It’s breathtaking, magnificent, glorious.
Tenet: Compared to our own capabilities, evolution is effectively all-powerful (omnipotent), yet knows nothing (nihilscient does not exactly roll off the tongue).
Result: We respect the products of evolution, appreciating that we could not possibly do as well in achieving balanced ecosystems (see exhibit A: modernity). We need not attribute the sustained outcome to a sentient, omniscient being: it’s a self-balancing dynamic.
Tenet: We rest on billions of years of heritage: what we do in our brief century on the planet is wholly in this context. We play a negligible role in making ourselves who we are.
Result: Less hubris, and more appreciation for the power of deep time. We appreciate that we are wired as social creatures, universally experiencing thought patterns that are “true-to-type.”
Tenet: The Law of Life within which evolution works is time-tested and is not likely to be improved by human meddling. We place our trust in evolution to produce sustainable communities of life.
Result: We stop acting like we know what’s best, approaching our role on the planet with humility. We recognize that we are only one species among millions in the community of life, and that we are all in this together. We only succeed in the long term if most others do as well. We care about all life.
Tenet: Our own lives are of finite duration. We are physical beings operating on physical flows and have no non-corporeal aspect, other than the lasting imprint we make on the world and in others.
Result: This belief system is about life in the here and now, not in life after death. It’s about all life: all creatures—and plants—great and small (all “people”), of which humans are only a tiny part. We savor our time on the planet, feel lucky to have the opportunity, and prioritize the legacy of the biophysical world: committed to leaving it no worse than we found it.
Tenet: What we have on Earth is rare, and inexpressibly valuable. The deep time that was required to enable current conditions represents an investment of unthinkable magnitude.
Result: Dismissal of economics as the means to ascertain value. Life, biodiversity, and ecological health become the currency of this religion. Everything else is secondary, tertiary, etc.
Tenet: Humans are not the pinnacle of creation. We are but one temporary twig-end on a vast tree of life. Every other species can outdo us in one way or another, performing tasks that we often cannot even comprehend.
Result: More humility (can’t have enough). We would come to value our fellow travelers on this planet, seeing them as part of a larger family, each with amazing and admirable capabilities that might have something to teach us. Selfish human rights give way to ideas far more bio-inclusive: but these are not rights that we grant—what would give us that right?
Tenet: The truth of how it all works may eternally be beyond our full comprehension. That’s okay: why would there be a guarantee of this? Given what we already know, we are justified in having faith that the magnificent emergent complexity we witness is just what happens when our universe is allowed to unfold under a simple but “lucky” set of rules.
Result: Relax. We are not obligated to understand everything. But we might understand enough to start making better decisions about how we live on this planet, and willingly put our fate back in the hands of the gods.
Tenet: We belong to the planet: it does not belong to us.
Result: We offer gratitude for the gift of life, and do not take from this world more than we need—also leaving enough for the rest of the community of life to thrive. We refrain from doing what we can, just because we can.
The Church of Life
So, that’s it: ten tenets of what essentially is a sort of religion grounded in what we already know, humbly admitting that we won’t know it all, accepting the wisdom of the gods of evolution, and tucking back into the community of life for the enduring benefit of all life. Maybe I’ll see you in church—the Church of Life.
Influences
Note that I did not work all this out myself, but picked up key pieces from Daniel Quinn’s writings, also benefiting greatly from fledgling exposure to Indigenous and animist ways of knowing and being. Last week’s post was on the same theme, providing additional tracers to the origins of these ideas.
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I am sympathetic to all your tenets, but what can we as a species do to alleviate the problem that there are just too many of us? China tried the one child policy for a while, but the urge to reproduce is too strong to be overcome by law or even custom. Should we just wait for the superflu which will kill 90% of us? Will such a thing even happen? If we care for the ecology of earth, at least to the extent that we want it to still support humans, is there a reasonable path to a sustainable ecology? Maybe we should just let nature (god) take its course and let whatever happens happen. Unfortunately, this would be horrible. We already see resource wars beginning. The future does not look bright for our children.
I don't know what to expect. In the near term, our youth are not encouraged about future prospects and are increasingly disinterested in bringing children into the world. More broadly, people could begin to walk away from modernity and its expectations. It may also be that adopting a radically different worldview, as sketched here, would act to suppress unsustainable birth rates according to values. Other cultures have managed this in the past, as on Tikopia. Methods may vary.
Recently, I've come to wonder about the best way to reduce human population, given that we are clearly in overshoot. What would this religion propose? Well, it seems that we should try to behave like other life forms. As far as I know, other species don't try to prolong life through artificial means (more than by, e.g. licking wounds). Overshoots in the populations of other species would be taken care of in ecologies by increasing the death rate to be higher than the birth rate. Forcing the birth rate lower, by artificial means, could make populations unsuccessful (because the populations would age and social groups would be less able to survive). Evolution might then look unkindly on species who developed such a propensity. Perhaps the best way to address it is to stop most medical interventions (except, perhaps, pain control to minimise suffering).
All proposed solutions to control the human population rely on technological fixes that require regular maintenance. And that maintenance requires lots of workers or fossil fuels. If all fossil fuels are exhausted, the human population will decline without a technological solution.
Mike,
If you read the Ishmael trilogy (Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael) you'll see the solution to the population problem. FOOD! Every year we produce more food to feed a growing population. But, when people get that food only one thing happens, more people! (Imagine a pair of mice who come upon a full grain silo. They are able to access the grain. Before long there are a million mice) But, every year the powers that be (UN, WTO, etc.) insist that we produce more food to feed the starving people of Africa, South America, etc. Where is the population on our planet growing? In just those places that need it the least. So, we shouldn't be concentrating on the "die off" of population, but the birth of new humans. By the way, contraception does NOT work (see Story of B for more and better details.
You seem to be saying that, since industrial agriculture is producing increasing quantities of food, then we need to concentrate on getting the birth rate down. I don't see the logic here, especially as you then say that contraception doesn't work. As I say, reducing birth rates ages the population. Increasing the death rate does the opposite. Which is better for the long term health of the species?
You've described Greco-Roman beliefism accurately but neglected to point out that Chinese civilization has never subscribed to it.
Founded by Lao Tzu and Confucius, it is simultaneously the most spiritual, the least religious, the most tolerant on earth.
While our forebears demanded belief in Jesus and struggled to master Nature, theirs elevated reason over faith.
They’ve always seen Man, Nature, and the Cosmos as psychophysical and indivisible.
While our forebears sought personal salvation in the afterlife, theirs pursued collective liberation in a dàtóng society.
While ours struggled with sin, theirs saw human error as mere temporary disharmony.
While ours clung to beliefs, ideals, absolutes, and dogmas, theirs distinguished ideals from facts and rejected fixed positions.
While we suppressed spirituality, they practiced harmony with the Tao, “A Thing, formless yet complete, That existed before heaven and earth. Without sound, without substance, It stands alone and unchanging. It is all-pervading and unfailing. We do not know Its name, but we call it Tao. Being one with Nature, the Sage lives in harmony with the Tao”.
In contemporary terms, they tacitly understand that the true Nature of Existence, and how it is arising, are inherently and tacitly obvious to anyone who remains in a state of pleasurable oneness with whatever and all presently arises.
Western society would be much happier and more peaceful if we had learned this instead of hopeful consoling bullshit.
Is Chinese civilisation, now, acting with those principles? If not, it is not just Western societies which need to learn that oneness.
I too became interested in Taoism and Zen about 30 years ago. I learned Tai Chi and still read my 365 Tao book of daily meditations. I totally agree with you that the Chinese "religious" culture far surpasses the ramblings of western religions. However, Tom (and Ishmael's) point is that until the agricultural revolution took hold, there was no need for humans to ask the question "How should humans live?" The human animal (let's limit it to Homo Sapiens) had perfected a way of living that goes back a quarter million years. When I say perfected I mean that evolution worked! We're here! But 10,000 years ago we ate fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and became Gods ourselves. The message became "God created the Earth for Man, and for Man to rule", hence …
Sorry, I've gotten a bit astray. But Taoism and Eastern philosophy evolved in our "Taker" culture (just as all the other religions of the world have). The "leavers" knew how to live with and within the Community of Life. We need to go back to eating from the Tree of Life.
Another great post. When I cam across the word "intelligence" it made be wonder about the words we use to describe these matters. Words like "wise" and "intelligence" have no objective meanings, they only have meanings which we, the inventors of human language, ascribe to them. I'm not sure that other species would even recognise the definitions that we give these kinds of words.
I think of intelligence as capturing notions like clever and smart, but far short of wise. Intelligence can get you/us into real trouble. Wisdom reins in intelligence/cleverness in order to avoid causing more trouble than you/we can handle.
Nice. Though "intelligence" and "wise" were just two examples. You also used "clever" and "smart" in your reply and these also have subjective definitions! Perhaps there is no way to talk about this stuff because we have to use the languages we have.
Wittgenstein, Russell, Whitehead and Korzybski quite clearly explained the influence of language on life.
Reality is only subjective actuality.
As a doctor, I've been wrestling with the problem of overpopulation for a few years now, although you express it much better than I can. Until the industrial / scientific revolution, the human population was fairly static, because high birth rates were balanced by high death rates from disease, accidents, predation from other creatures, wars and the like. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, we doctors began to invent all sorts of things like clean water, sewage disposal, antibiotics and vaccinations which pushed human population dynamics way out of balance. (Sorry.). The birth rate stayed similar to what it always had been, the death rate went way down and the human population went way up. Contraception became available at a fairly late stage in the game, but has been opposed by many (Catholic Church, anyone?).
I'm not sure how we correct this, but a wider acceptance of some basic principles might help. Death always has been a part of life, and when our time comes, we should accept it and exit gracefully. There is a vast industry, particularly in the United States, devoted to keeping people alive as long as possible, regardless of the cost or the quality of life, and I really don't see the point, but helping someone down the exit ramp would risk criminal prosecution. Human populations shouldn't expand beyond the carrying capacity of their local environment, because the result will either be a population crash, or importing resources from someone else's environment to their detriment. There is no such thing as "life-saving" medicine, surgery or vaccination, only "life-prolonging", which may or may not be a good thing depending on the context. If resources are limited, children should probably be given a higher priority for treatment, rather than older people (like me), because I've had my turn but they haven't had theirs.
You must read this article by Richard Heinberg that has the following memorable quotation:
"It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence."
Thanks for a great post, and for the nutritious food for thought.
It occurs to me that one destiny for our planet and for its cargo of all-too-plentiful and all-too-acquisitive humanity is this: an impoverished and attenuated ecosystem (in which many of the complex life forms have gone extinct) which is still able to support a small human population living a relatively modern lifestyle. I don't relish that destiny, but, sadly, it seems more likely than the beautiful one you envision.
I'm not sure what you mean by "relatively modern" but modernity requires ecologically destructive behaviours (e.g.there is no such thing as "clean energy" apart from foraged food) so will always be unsustainable. A much lower population might be able to pause the destruction by cannibalising stuff that the defunct part of the previous population used. But the destruction will have to start again for modernity to continue. Maybe, with humans, all that can be done is a constant bounce between very destructive and recycling. Until accessible fossil fuels run out or until extinction overtakes our species.
I agree with everything here, except your ongoing, recent crusade against free will.
No surprise. After all, you're a scientist, and science has claimed a monopoly on truth for a long time. Modernity was built by the materialist mindset. Scientists and technocrats, geniuses who designed nuclear weapons (and missiles, drones, fighter jets etc. etc. ad nauseam).
Some truth (known by wise indigenous peoples) is beyond hardcore determinists. It 'does not compute' in their billiard-ball model of reality, in which they believe their own brains to be computers. They even view the universe itself as a machine, inanimate and lifeless, bar life on Earth (whose origin they still can't explain).
People didn't evolve to recognize truth, but we can do it (machines can't) – by intuition, logic or both.
But, divorced as it is, now, from metaphysical questions, science has become hubristic, regarding itself as the sole path to truth. 'Experts' seem to have become the new priesthood.
Most successful scientists, while being highly intelligent, tend to have a certain level of cold detachment. (How else could they perform cruel experiments on animals, or develop deadlier cluster bombs (or diesel powered leaf blowers?))
This quality is the opposite of wisdom.
Finally (this is not a joke), what is the difference between 'free will', 'agency' and 'volition'?
Mere semantics. 'Human agency' is just the preferred current term for what used to be called 'free will'.
We can probably never know the full, actual truth. So we are left with unproven beliefs, suited to taste. My point is that amazing, incomprehensible things *can* arise out of simple rules. The fact that every particle in my body is attracted to (or repelled from) every other particle in the entire causally-connected universe makes the story primarily about relationships (interactions) rather than particles, and these can become overwhelmingly complex. I'm not for a second trying to remove mystery and awe by accepting a simple basis. But I get it that the notion can be distasteful and seem sterile (yet the emergent result is clearly not sterile!).
The distinction I make between free will and awareness/agency/volition is that the latter set can arise out of complex interactions, and require no override to the interactions we know to take place and to which we know no exceptions. Yes: we can do things whose instructions originate partly in our own bodies (partly because external influences from seconds ago to billions of years ago play a substantial part)—so we have agency and volition. Being an exceedingly complex "machine" obeying nothing but physics still allows us to be agents in this world (effect outcomes that we can trace to our actions). Free will to me implies something that defeats physics ("determinism" modulo indeterminacy)—something beyond physics. No one can rule it out, but neither can anyone prove that we need any more than physics and emergent complexity to account for everything. Either way, we do not choke off mystery and awe.
My crusade against free will is motivated by a desire to fight the Human Reich (the expression of human supremacy). Believing we have special powers to override the physical universe smacks of transcendent hubris and narcissism to me (borrowed from next week's post), and I think it has damaging consequences, like modernity. Humility is a better approach, I think.
I couldn't agree more!
Whatever our differences about the definitions/words, I'm with you all the way in fighting human supremacy etc.
Thanks for your great essay and good humoured responses to all the comments.
Using Occam's Razor, the most likely explanation for most people's belief that they have free will is that they actually do have free will.
Prof Murphy's argument against this boils down to his assertion that he can conceive of a process whereby an organism could pass a Turing test for free will without violating any of the known laws of physics.
This is an impressive intellectual achievement, but not a proof.
For instance, there are galleries of computer generated pictures online of people who look so realistic it is impossible to tell they are not human (apart from their perfect teeth). This is not proof that my face is computer generated; it is proof that the technology is very advanced.
In any case, I believe it is a straw man argument that some nonphysical force or influence or spirit or whatever is required to explain free will. I believe I have free will without needing some woo message coming through the ether. It's simply a property of the physical world that needs no explanation unless you're the type who worries about such things.
Tom isn't trying to explain free will, he (and others) are showing that it can't possibly exist, in a physical world. Explaining belief in free will is a different matter. People believe all sorts of things for which there is no evidence or physical explanation.
I experience free will. It (or agency or volition – whatever you want to call it) exists. Nothing outside of physics is required – indeed, there's no such thing as 'supernatural'. If something exists, it exists in Nature.
You experience what you think of as free will. You say free is just physics, but haven't describes how it corresponds to physics. If it does correspond to physics then it is not "free" in that it is a consequence of something else.
My first time here. I appreciate your writing, only read a few posts. You express yourself clearly. This post has you sounding a little like Spinoza, without the overarching unity of reason and ethics.
A few observations as I read:
#1 Not sure why Biblical stories preface an attempt at universal religion based on evolution and the worship of life. The issues you bring up arise because this tradition had the universe rotate around humans. The Copernican Revolution that helped usher in the scientific viewpoint changed this dynamic.
#2 Connect whatever appreciation, humility, and wonder with actions or they are meaningless words. White people have exploited the colored peoples of the world for over 500 years and have become wealthy beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. Not that they are content or happy. They still want more. It doesn’t take much to belong to the 1or 2% that consumes more resources and creates more pollution than most peoples of the world. The problem is not just overpopulation. It is the wealth and power that we take or granted. It would be the height of hypocrisy to think that a universal religion for all people has to turn around wealthy lifestyle habits.
#3 Biological evolution produced hunter gathers who were egalitarian. Cultural evolution started after humans settled down to produce the opposite. We live in hierarchical societies today that have nothing to do with biologic evolution.
#4 If modern science can’t answer questions 6th graders come up with, how can you know with certainty that the universe is such that there is no freedom? Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason provides an argument that limits empirical objective knowledge to make room for freedom, to give but one example. Free will is a Christian notion, which may be a reason you wish to squash it. I think there are other approaches to the same end (responding to your comment on free will above)
#5 The law of life within which evolution works is for each individual of the species to secure the species’ continuation by reproducing its genetic material. The rich people in the world are currently borrowing from the next generation to secure their current lifestyles. Many of the world’s poor would do the same if they could. The Scottish Enlightenment is a good place to look for the origin of modern hubris.
#6 Trusting evolution is trusting blind faith. Humans are in a race to the bottom that may or may not cause extinction. A biologist responded he has colonies in Petri dishes that die out all the time. Do humans have a choice to live up to how we named ourselves, or are we fated like the organisms in his Petri dishes?
#7 If I read you correctly, you believe in scientism, but state that “Science is a way to get at a truth (or a part thereof), which is something. But it should not be mistaken as the way to get at the truth.” Are these two positions compatible?
#8 Yes, life on Earth is precious and rare, and I am not sure that a universal religion of evolution will change the habits of people desecrating this amazing planet. It will take more than wonder to transform the consciousness of the wealthy and powerful people so that they stop being the way they are. You would need to figure this out, given the late stage of environmental destruction that humanity is in. I assume this is the motivation for proposing this belief system.
#9 Imagine a world where all 8 billion people on Earth had your carbon footprint and resource demands. Would humans still be a viable species or would we already have gone extinct? How does your belief system change this dynamic?
The issues before us are complex. I appreciate your care and effort in attempting to solve these problems. The idea of a universal religion based on evolution is interesting, but it would have to be flushed out, to better reflect the human condition, and would need to depend on ecological practices that keep people’s environmental destruction to a minimum, for a future.
The tenets your propose and many of your other recent posts reflect the ethos of a vegan lifestyle of least harm. I have never thought of that lifestyle as religious, just the obvious choice for a compassionate and sustainable future that thrives on all the marvels of life.
I've been pondering this concept for quite a while now and have been trying to figure out how to, "…walk away from modernity and its expectations." I read Ishmael back when it came out and have had my kids read it also. Some things I have been able to do like homeschooling my kids, eschewing certain technologies, and generally creating more friction in my life. While at the same time, if you were to look in from the outside, I'd seem like a mostly middle class guy and his family living like everyone else. I think everyone will have to figure out how to do that within their own circumstances, but I'd be curious to hear about how others are doing it and also ideas about other ways of becoming a leaver rather than a taker while still living in a society.
A quick transition does not seem likely. I was born into Taker culture, and will probably always have Taker traits. But I can begin a mental shift, as you have done, and stop doing some things. As more people do so, it becomes easier: both more acceptable and better support for alternatives arise. Right now we're stuck in the molasses, but someday that molasses may pour out of the jar. The first step is no longer viewing modernity as our friend, and looking for new relationships.
What enabled the explosive growth of the human population since the 1950s was the use of petroleum-derivative products for agriculture. I'm providing the following paragraph from James Howard Kunstler's 2005 book The Long Emergency:
The attrition of global populations by disease may be unavoidable. Some readers may regard it as the inevitable revenge of nature against the hubris of a human species arrogantly exceeding the carrying capacity of its habitat. Some may regard it as a moral victory against wickedness. Some may view it in the therapeutic mode as a positive development for the health of the planet. Many self-conscious “humanists” have militated for the goal of reducing population growth—though most of them would have probably preferred widespread birth control to a die-off. But that kind of thinking might have been just another product of the narcotic comfort of cheap oil, as merely stabilizing the earth’s population at current levels (or even 1968 levels) would arguably still have left humanity beyond the earth’s carrying capacity. Apart from these issues of attitude and ethics, however, a major decline in world population, or change in demographic profiles, is apt to have profound and strange repercussions on everyday life.
A particular phrase in your post triggered a recollection in me: "What’s left are those able to live in rough balance in relation to the other survivors." I remembered, from reading the Ishmael books, particularly 'My Ishmael,' at a certain point, Ishmael describes the way in which tribes (Awks & Cawks) relate to each other: "Give as good as you get, but don't be too predictable."
Elsewhere, you ruminate, generally, about the human tendency (need?) to tell stories about ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the ecosystem. This brought, to my mind, Ernest Becker's book, 'The Denial of Death,' in which he puts forth the thesis that, at the particular moment in child development when the child comes to understand that they, and everyone and everything that they love and depend on, will die. Becker proposes that this realization produces considerable anxiety, so much so that the child does everything it can to find a reason – a story – of why this is not true. (Becker calls it an "immortality project.") Stories such as "There will be pie in the sky by-and-by," or "We are masters of the Universe."
At the conclusion of 'The Denial of Death,' Becker suggests that humans might find a story (cultural mythology) that is less destructive than the current one, though he does not hold out much hope. Your 'Evolution as Religion' goes a long way, in my view, to establishing such a story.
Wow – this just resonates so well with me and my thinking over the years. I'm almost giddy.
I just keep stumbling over one major hurdle – the false dichotomy of humans v nature. As you mentioned, evolution is omnipotent and nihilscient – we all fall within its scope – there is no separation. Modern society with its rampant consumption and CO2 and PFAS and wasp-killer sprays and totalitarian agriculture is as much a part of nature as a Kalahari inhabitant: a human or insect or cell in the gut microbiome. There is no there there – no separate free-will soul guiding our minds and hands, no over-arching intent and purpose, no deity to assess or lay judgement or even assert that there is such a thing as a transgression. All is one and everything is forever evolving – at least until however this all ends or what time ultimately "means".
I would propose another level of humility: moral relativism. Everything including our current understanding of morality has evolved to the present point in time. It is incomplete and subject to constant revision. We can only attempt to do our best at judging the likely outcomes of our actions – in terms of better and worse. We might argue that life is better than no life and that a diversity of life is better than widespread species extinction. That our actions do have foreseeable impacts that can lead to better and worse outcomes and that knowledge provides the impetus for the "should" as in: we "should" act accordingly.
So let's be humble and revel in the present – somehow Tracy Chapman's beautiful song: "Heaven's here on earth" comes to mind –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvMbYRBPnHI.
There's a problem with moral relativism. Some things are just wrong – killing a child, for example.
Belief in right and wrong does not have to imply belief in God.
I don't see how moral relativism precludes such a belief. It merely acknowledges our limits and that everything – even codes of conduct – tends to evolve.
Some things will always be wrong, like the example I gave. No amount of evolution will change that.
Nothing is "just wrong" even the example you give. In some cultures, in some situations, killing a child would be considered the right thing to do for the sake of the tribe (e.g. if the child has some severe disability or if twins were born but both can't be supported). "Belief" in right and wrong probably does imply a belief in a god because that morality is defined elsewhere (outside nature), requiring a belief in it. But what is right or wrong is a feature of the culture and society one is embedded in and, like all decisions, comes from the accumulation of experiences. Morality is a personal thing but, in a society, most members of society have similar morals and some of them become encoded in laws.
Evolution has equipped our social species with empathy, a mechanism (for lack of a better term) for restraining us from killing each other off, a set of emotional reactions that, while they don't entirely prevent us from killing each other, make us more (or less, depending on the individual) uncomfortable about doing so.
The human storytelling system provides us with explanations (codes of conduct, e.g. 'killing children is just wrong') for why we are having these emotions. The human need to feel "in control" of that which is beyond our control (nature) comes along to tell us why we should kill off anyone who does not agree with our particular story of why we should not kill each other off.
It is not that 'killing children is just wrong,' but that killing children is counter productive to survival of the species, and any population of homo sapiens that felt it was okay to kill children has disappeared.
Dr. Murphy, you are a Religious Naturalist, but may not have yet heard the term. The religious orientation you describe already exists: religious-naturalist-association.org.
My hypothesis is that once humans evolved full behavioral modernity, it was just a matter of time before some tribe began harnessing the power of fossil fuels to their advantage. Blaming our predicament on the usual suspects (capitalism, the west/white people, personal greed, etc) has never made for a satisfying explanation. The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) and "nature abhors a gradient" is the only explanation that has ever made sense to me.
The purpose of life is to disperse energy
"The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species.
The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.
Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations.
There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations.
Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows, matter cycles. " Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's origins.
This idea is not new, and is certainly not mine. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures in Dublin in 1943. More recently, Jeffrey Wicken, Harold Morowitz, Eric Schneider and others have taken this concept considerably further, buoyed by results from a range of studies, particularly within ecology. Schneider and Dorian Sagan provide an excellent summary of this hypothesis in their recent book, "Into the Cool".
The concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound. Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably to the non-living world. This dangerous idea, once broadly distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow.
Moreover, evolution is not driven by the machinations of selfish genes propagating themselves through countless millennia. Rather, ecology and evolution together operate as a highly successful, extremely persistent means of reducing the gradient generated by our nearest star. In my view, evolutionary theory (the process, not the fact of evolution!) and biology generally are headed for a major overhaul once investigators fully comprehend the notion that the complex systems of earth, air, water, and life are not only interconnected, but interdependent, cycling matter in order to maintain the flow of energy.
Although this statement addresses only naturalistic function and is mute with regard to spiritual meaning, it is likely to have deep effects outside of science. In particular, broad understanding of life's role in dispersing energy has great potential to help humans reconnect both to nature and to planet's physical systems at a key moment in our species' history."
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674
I always appreciate your posts Tom, and I found this one a cut above. The 10 tenets are now posted on our fridge. The knowing is easy; the doing is the challenge.
On the issue of overpopulation I wonder if Gaia has a solution in the works. Here's two posts from Nate Hagens (also excellent blog) that discusses developing issues in human fertility and the effects of endocrine disruption:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/02-shannaswan
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/99-jeremy-grantham
Tom, yet again you seem to be mirroring my own philosophical journey.
The one point where I don't think you go quite far enough though is that the evolutionary process applies to EVERYTHING. Quarks, atoms, molecules, rocks etc etc.
I'm not sure what difference including inaminate things that makes though 🤔 I guess it makes evolution even more of a fundamental, god-like thing
Hi Tom! Thank you very much for your articles and reflections, very interesting. In the current article, I see an impotence of evolution at the very level of life. If we view life as physics at a universal level, each could have its own rules or laws, and possibly life also affects the laws of physics (currently unprovable). At this point, I believe that evolution, or rather adaptation, would be one of the rules of life. There could even be a higher order in which life is above physics, with physics being just another part of the laws of life (the ones that are most evident to us in our material and temporal world). Even on another scale, life could be independent of a material, spatial, and temporal framework… life would be the potentiality of having life; it would already be life in essence. These are several intermingled ideas. The main one is that I see evolution or adaptation as just another mechanism within life, not a final explanation in itself of life. Thank you, regards.